HomeMy WebLinkAboutCOM 0675.428 2022-2024August 19, 2024
Gerard C. Gibson
President
Hawaii Hotel Alliance
Ms. Ashley Kierkiewicz, Chair
Policy Committee on Planning, Land Use and Development
Hawai'i County Council
Hawai'i County Building
25 Aupuni Street
Hilo, HI 96720
Support for and Comments on Bill 121 Draft 2
Dear Chairperson Ashley Kierkiewicz and Members of the Policy Commission on Planning, Land
Use and Development,
My name is Jerry Gibson and I am the President of the Hawaii Hotel Alliance ("HHA") and have
been a hotelier in Hawaii for more than 42 years. HHA membership includes all of the major
hotel brands in Hawai'i, including Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Aulani, Outrigger, Springboard
Hospitality and Highgate Hotels. Our members represent almost 32,000 hotel rooms of the
approximately 43,000 hotel rooms in Hawai'i.
The Hawai'i Hotel Alliance is in Support with Exceptions to Bill 121 Draft 2. We have worked
with the four major islands over the last seven years and produced, both for counties and
states, several pieces of legislation. Each county has specific needs and Hawaii County is no
different. In principle, we are comfortable with the following:
1. Closer scrutiny of those TARs that are not paying taxes.
2. Never a problem with hosted rentals paying full GET and TAT.
3. Hosting platforms are notorious for not following up on their promises. This legislation
will help.
4. The numbers supplied by DBEDT are self -reported. The new numbers will be verified
with registration and frequency.
Chairperson Ashley Kierkiewicz
Page 2
The difficult pieces of the legislation are:
1. Our belief is non -hosted units in residential areas should not be encouraged to expand.
Hosted, yes as properties, are monitored by the owner for parking, noise challenges,
trash etc. A suggestion may be to grandfather what hosted homes there are. Allow no
unhosted in residential areas. Allowing ADUs for unhosted venues is almost an
impossibility to enforce. There is no known mechanism to do so and, unfortunately, we
have bad results.
2. There is no real enforcement concept mentioned. We can have all the registration,
fines, rules, etc. but if we don't have an inspection arm that has enforcement powers,
then very little will change. Allow those fines to be a return on investment to pay for
the enforcement. The failure on all Islands to enforce has been the downfall of the
entire program. The platforms absolutely don't care. They want continued volume and
do close to nothing to police the challenges of transient accommodation rentals. Take
a hotel for example, if they did not charge for TAT, GET, then the IRS, Media, Police
would be on the situation quickly. This does not happen with TARs, too many and close
to zero enforcement.
In conclusion, thank you for the extraordinary efforts to work through the transient
accommodation rental challenges. We support the bills and bring up the few suggestions that
can help to make these three bills stronger and more effective.
Thank you so much for all your effort and hard work on this very important issue.
Mahalo and Aloha,
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Jerry Gibson
President
Hawaii Hotel Alliance