CommentsEASTSIDER-When the City Council can’t achieve a 15-0 vote by their usual “Brown Act? What Stinkin’ Brown Act” methods, the result gets messy … very messy.
By the time you read this article, the City Planning Commission will have met on Thursday afternoon, September 13, to consider yet another, revised, Short-term Rental Ordinance, now renamed to be called a “Home Sharing Ordinance.” For those not closely following the process, there are three documents available online:
(1) Department Recommendation Report here.
(2) Updated Draft Home Sharing Ordinance here.
(3) Home Sharing Ordinance Background and FAQ here.
The Recommendations
First, a hats off to Matthew Glesne and the Planning Department staff who put together the departmental recommendations, all 265 pages of it! This is the best, and certainly most complete, history of all the ins and outs of the short-term rental saga, including who recommended what changes and when during the entire process.
Remember, this saga has been going on for something like three years. Actually four if you include the mess in Venice where greedy owners turned rental housing by the beach into Airbnb rentals and party hearty places. Just ask Jane Taguchi. Heck, yours truly has written over a dozen articles for CityWatchon the “regulation” of Airbnb and their progeny since 2015.
Anyhow, the recommendations are superficially straightforward bureaucratic mumbo jumbo designed to cover the City’s butt. First, find that the Ordinance is not a “project” as defined by CEQA, and second that the Ordinance is exempt from CEQA guidelines.
From there, find that there is no negative impact on the environment, adopt the Negative Declaration attached, approve the Ordinance, adopt the Staff Report, adopt the included findings, and recommend the whole ball of wax for approval by the City Council.
Inside the Recommendations
On the one hand, the proposed Ordinance limits home sharing to 120 days, instead of the 180 days previously proposed. On the other hand, it also allows for expanding from 120 to 240 days/year under supplemental conditions.
There is a surcharge per night for enforcement/compliance, but elsewhere the amount of the TOT fees only provides for 10% to go for enforcement. The details of how all this will work are murky, to say the least.
For example, there is a prohibition from further disallowing units subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) from short-term rentals, but elsewhere it is noted that something like 1300 RSO units per year have been lost while the short-term rental Ordinance has been in process. That would be around 4000 units already gone during the three years the Ordinance has been in play.
This is important, since the City’s version of rent control only applies to a small percentage of all rental housing in the City.
Remember the Kool-Aid
Sort of finessed in this voluminous paperwork is the fact that the Ordinance has been bouncing around for a couple of years and is guaranteed passage because the City is already banking the money.
As I wrote back in March 2017, despite the fact that short-term rentals are and always have been illegal in LA City, the City signed a contract with Airbnb to collect TOT taxes on their short-term rentals and hand the money over to City Hall. You can read that article here.
As far as I can tell, that contract is still operable, and the City has been collecting taxes on illegal rentals ever since they made the deal. Let’s hear it for LA City Attorney Mike Feuer! Hell of a lawyer, great clients.
While the proposed Ordinance has a number of new conditions, such as a registration requirement, the administrative guidelines are not spelled out other than saying that new process will be online. The devil will be in the details, and we don’t know if the City will do this function or it will be subcontracted.
For example, at page A-26, the proposal is to add five City staff positions for enforcement, with this caveat: “This minimal staffing approach would require engaging with a third-party consultant or contracting services.”
And on the next page, we see that “If the City were to procure a comprehensive suite of third party services and apply them to all hosting platform services operating in the City, it is estimated to cost approximately $1.5-$2 million per year.”
Similar vagueness still abounds over much of the specifics in the 17-page Proposed Home-Sharing Ordinance, which demonstrates that the City Council is not all together on the Ordinance. I particularly like the creation of another “task force.” Oh goody.
The Takeaway
I am not going to even try to go through all the ins and outs of the current proposal. I strongly recommend that everyone read, or at least skim, the excellent and detailed 265-page Staff Report whose link can be found at the beginning of this article. Actually, if you look at the first 28 pages of Project Analysis, you should be up to speed.
I don’t think this is one of those “time is of the essence” moments. Clearly, the Council is all over the map on short-term rentals. The original draft was mandated by the Council in 2015, and the City Planning Commission’s 2016 draft got PLUM’d, with various Council Motions clogging the pipes as well.
My guess is that whatever the Planning Commission does, which will be whatever Mayor Garcetti wants (since he appointed all of them) doesn’t mean that there is any solid consensus among the Council offices.
So, take notes, choose your side, lobby the heck out of PLUM and the Housing Commission, not to mention your City Councilmember, and let the games go forth. You gotta know that all the backdoor dealin’ would make Ralph M. Brown turn over in his grave, but that’s the way we roll in LA.
(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
