2018-09-20 Leeward Exh B (Bill 108 re Short-term Vacation Rentals)

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adding one more item of why the Director could deny the renewal of a nonconforming use certificate. Recommendation 14. So when we issued your background and recommendation report, originally, the Department was under the understanding that short-term vacation rentals, un-hosted short-term vacation rentals, were classified as an R-1 residential occupancy, and basically the R-1 residential occupancy requires a higher standard of building and fire code compliance, such as fire sprinklers, ADA compliance. The Building Division between when your recommendation was released and now sought the opinion of the International Building Code Commission and they did just recently confirm that the short-term vacation rentals would not be considered an R-1 occupancy, and therefore would not need to meet those requirements. So we are changing this recommendation to basically add something into this bill that says during the registration process the Department would need to check to make sure that at least the structure has gotten the basic – building, electrical, plumbing permits – that you would need for a standard dwelling. And Recommendation 15 would be to increase, create increased fines for violation of this bill. We did speak with Maui and Kaua‘i county planning departments and those directors informed us that because vacation rentals are very profitable businesses, the fines need to be high enough to discourage violation of the vacation rental law. Honolulu and, I believe, Maui are currently moving legislation through their councils to increase their fines to 20,000 dollars, and our fines in our current Zoning Code are, start at 100 dollars per day plus a one-time civil fine of 500 dollars. So there is some recognition that those fines would need to be increased to effectively enforce this bill. The Director did say that one avenue that we could do that in is when we adopt Planning Department Rules of Practice and Procedure to implement the bill, should it be adopted, we can create a fine structure at that time. So that will be something that we will be looking at in the Planning Department. And then the last recommendation from the Planning Director is just a housekeeping recommendation. There are – let’s see – it’s to add the language “short-term vacation rentals” to Article 7, Division 2, Section 25-7-22(a), to include short-term vacation rentals as a permitted use in the CDH district. So you notice under the permitted uses section, it listed CDH, but then when you go into the actual section of the Zoning Code for Downtown Hilo Commercial District for a list of the permitted uses, short-term vacation rentals was not added to that section. So it’s just a housekeeping measure to make sure that the Zoning Code is consistent throughout. So before I move on to the Windward Planning Commission’s recommendations, were there any questions on the Director’s recommendations from the Commission? th Okay, so, as I mentioned, the Windward Planning Commission met on September 6. They discussed a lot of issues, which I’m sure many of them will be re-discussed today by the Leeward Commission. I just wanted to touch on two or three of those issues that were discussed. A few of the Commissioners felt that short-term vacation rentals, because they are businesses, they should pay the entire cost of enforcement. And what I mean by that is any fees and fines paid by the rental operator should be high enough so that the enforcement account can support new enforcement staff positions. They did not want to see money being allocated from the 16 EXHIBIT B