City Council - Regular Meeting

tit uh your garage doors don't have to be insulated. They're not title 24. So, I understand we're trying to keep embers out of a garage from starting things on fire. Um but uh I think it makes sense to uh possibly um make an addendum to that and not wait two years. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Anybody else in the audience wishing to speak on any consent item D1 through D5? Seeing no one, we'll bring it back to council. I see we do have the fire marshall here this evening and we did discuss this overall issue at length last meeting. I would ask the question is is this particular item something that was required by the state or was this something that we included as a local requirement?

Thank you, mayor. I'll take a stab at this and then if I need some help from Toni Vansan, I'll I'll bring him up. The way the code reads is that it is a weather stripping material that complies u with a couple options. And I believe to the best of my knowledge that doesn't mandate a metal piece along the garage door. There are gaskets that are fire rating, which doesn't necessarily mean it has to be metal. It could be a weather stripping type material that meets that fire resistive rating.

So, we're not requiring the metal for certain. We're we're accepting any option that's fire rated. That is correct.

Okay. All right. I think that that addresses my question. Sure. Go ahead. Well, thank you, mayor. U on the fire rating, do we do you know what that fire rating is? Because because garage doors um are not fire rated that I'm aware of. I mean, not not typically. So, I'm wondering what the rating of the flashing or or material would need to be. Yeah. Just going off of uh and I'm looking at page 45. It looks it gives an ASM rating and it talks about a period of 2,000 hours. Um, and some other code type language in there that I would need Chief Anson to answer, but I believe that is the 2,000 hours is the rating you're looking for.

That that two I mean 1 hour, 2 hour, 3/4 of an hour. I mean 2,000 hours. Yeah. All year long. That's pretty cool. I think it's referring to the the test. It's referring to the test that it's subjected to and not necessarily the length of time that it withstands. I'm sorry, but you said it in the code it mentions that it's a certain rating or fire rating is required. Well, maybe it I mean it sounds like it's using a terminology in a different way. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Does council have any Oh, you have another question?

Sure. Am I correct in recalling that um that that the garage door flashing by whatever composition it was a a new requirement from the state for that would to be applied in the very high and high uh fire hazard areas. and that the only element optional element was whether or not we as a council would extend that requirement to new construction or really huge renovations in the um uh in other parts of I wooi wild urban interface area that are not they're in the moderate risk rather than the high and very high rates.

That is correct. That's the that's our interpretation already required in the very high high and we are adding to the moderate. Okay. So, we'll we'll have those flashings in there because that's been required of the state and anybody that's going to be serving building new garage doors in the area is going to be able to accommodate that for the fire high and very high zones and it's only a question for the moderates. That's correct. Thank you. Any seeing no other questions? I'll entertain a motion. Move approval of the consent agenda. Uh minus D6 minus Yeah. of items 1 through five of the consent agenda. Yes. Thank you. Second.

Okay. We have a motion by council member Funk. Second by Council Member Peak. Roll call, please. Council member Funk. Yes. Council member Peak. Yes. Council member Nome. Yes. Mayor Proderas. Yes. Mayor Robo. Yes. Motion passes unanimously. All right. Thank you. We will proceed on to updates from the city manager, Mr. Lewis.

Yes. Good evening, mayor and members of council. Glad to see you. I do have a few things. Uh first, we want to talk about the new lion water fountain or the restored lion. There is our lion. And there's the council enjoying the rededication of Leo the lion. He's back. It's amazing that we've seen the old you have your sticker there. Thank you, council member. And what we do have souvenir stickers if you'd like one. And it was amazing to see people of their pictures over the generations that they were sharing prior to this. And so we're really pleased that uh people can enjoy Leo the Lion. Woo at the Zoo is a great hit with many Valentine's Day activities, uh Valentine's for the animals, the whole bit. So really a great day. Congressman Petta was in town last week and we had a press event with him. It was a joint news conference with uh the mayor and the council and the congressman uh announcing the allocation of $850,000 towards improvements to our police department. So, we're grateful to the congressman and uh appreciate the council being out there on a nice day and uh we're looking forward to these really uh adding to our police and fire station projects, but this specifically for the police station. So, we're grateful to Congressman Jimmy Petta for his leadership. Next, I want to talk about the Firewise USA community recognition. Attackero Fire and Emergency Services is thrilled to announce the Long Valley neighborhood has officially earned recognition as an NFPA Firewise USA community. This is the second community in Atascaderoa within the past eight months to join the national firewise program. This underscores the city's growing commitment to wildfire safety and resilience. Participating in firewise provides quite a few benefits. To learn more, visit nfpa.org/education andress research wildfire-usa. We'll make sure we post that somewhere. That's a lot. I also know of another community or two that are considering this program and it really helps with your fire safety and insurance. So, appreciate our fire and emergency services department working with neighbors on this. Uh if you want to take a break from worrying about fires, you can go to the 2026 Central Coast Craft Beer Festival

March 21st in the Sen Gardens. So, this will be always great. We have over 55 independently owned breweries, ceries, selzeries, we have kombucha, all kinds of good stuff. uh to get tickets. central coastbeerfest.com. It's from 12 to 4. So, this event gets bigger every year and you don't want to miss that. We have other announcements and registrations for recreation. This is last call on several things. We have T-ball on the 27th, adult basketball on the 2nd, and adult social kickball on the 23rd. So, you don't want to miss those. And if you want to sponsor any of our recreation or events, it's a great way to feature your business. You can uh do that at events atasaskcadetero.org. So, we would love to see you be a sponsor of our events as we create memories for families and our residents and neighbors. It's a lot of fun. Farmers Market will extend to 5:30 starting on March 11th. And the time change is this uh March 8th so that we will have more light. So, extend to 5:30 starting on March 11th. You want to make sure you get your locally grown produce at our farmers market. If you have any questions, you can go to visitaskcadero.com or ataskascadero.org. And that concludes my report. Thank you, mayor and councel. All right. Thank you. Does members of the council have any questions for the city manager? Seeing none, we will move on to our next item on the agenda, which is community forum. Community forum is reserved for persons wishing to address the city council on any item not on the agenda, but over which the council has jurisdiction. The Brown Act prohibits the council from entering into a discussion uh for on matters not on the agenda. Although we may at our discretion ask staff a quick question or ask staff to contact a speaker. Uh speakers are limited to three minutes. We ask that you state your name for the record and we ask that anybody wishing to speak during committee form approach the podium. Now

good evening council and staff. Jeff Osland once again. I have to halfway uh or fully commend our city and our city council and our staff. I had to endure the city of St. Louis Abyspo's council meeting a week ago. And let me tell you, if you'd like to know cities that are messed up and the egos that get involved, it's ridiculous. Um, and I'm thrilled that our city definitely does not uh play that game, including our city manager. It is insane what one has to endure to get through a meeting with the city of Slow. Um, so it's absolutely insane and I do commend our council for um doing what they need to do. It doesn't matter if I agree or not. I do make my valid points, but um at least we're cohesive. Thank you.

Okay. Anybody else wishing to speak in community forum? Seeing none, I'll say thank you for the favorable comparison. Uh we will move on. We will mention briefly that item G1, a public hearing regarding a zoning change and conditional use permit for Chick-fil-A has been cancelled at the request of the applicant and will be considered at our four weeks from now at our March 24th uh meeting. So, but I did want to see it. Did anybody by chance come to speak on that item? Okay, great. Seeing that, we will move on to item H1, a management report, a discussion of short-term rentals. And I believe either the city attorney or council members need to speak first.

Um, Seth Peak, I'll be recusing myself of the discussion and leaving chambers. I have a conflict of interest owning a complex in a multif family zone and I will be back for public comment. Thank you, Heather Newsome. I'll be recusing myself due to an FPPC letter ruling as well. Okay. All right. Thank you both. And we'll give you a chance to um vacate and uh the chambers for the time being and you are can of course watch the watch the proceedings and rejoin us during public comment. Okay.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Good evening. This is a topic we've been discussing at great length. Um, we've done a lot of community outreach recently and tonight we just like to discuss, you know, what we've heard in the community and have a general discussion about where we'd like to go next with this topic. So, a little background. We first brought this up at a strategic planning session back in 2024 and later that year we actually came back to city council to talk about a framework and some basic principles of what we would like to see in a task atadero. With that we actually established a draft ordinance and took it to planning commission. But then at that point we realized that we needed to do some more outreach. So we took a pause um we recalculated our efforts and we did a lot more outreach. We had two very definitive outreach sessions. One in January of this year and one in more recently in February of this year. One was what I one of our uh coffee with the planner sessions. Very well attended. Another one was right here at city hall in our foyer. And it was very well attended. Had a lot of great feedback from community. Um sort of from both sides of the fence on this topic. You know, folks in support of short-term rentals, folks that wanted to see more regulation, and folks that were just there to listen. So, I'm going to lay out some principles for you with the state kind of gives us, you know, a basic framework. They don't allow these in accessory dwelling units. They don't allow them in the urban dwelling units, which are another form of a accessory unit on properties. And they don't allow them in units that are deed restricted as affordable. So, those are the basic standards that the state gives us. And this is a good look at our atascular regulations and our municipal code right now. And you can see the slide is blank intentionally. We don't have a code on on short-term rentals. So, just thought I'd throw that out there. We do have a process. We do issue business licenses.

We do restrict them to one rental per property. And they must be within a legally permitted well. And of course, you know, there's the building code provisions and there's the collection of what we call toot or transient occupancy tax. they must register for that like any other short-term rental like hotels and motel in the community. So stats, there is a little bit of a different number in your staff report about the number of short-term rentals out there. After refining our our uh analysis, we realized there's a lot more licenses that were issued than are actually short-term rentals that are out there. So, a lot of those licenses when we went and pulled the data um were actually delinquent and actually weren't renewed. So the the true number is there's actually currently 150 licensed in the city. There are more inquiries since we began talking about this topic. Um it be you know it's sort of spiked an interest. I think folks think that hey we're going to be doing something different. So they're trying to get their their foothold and and get a unit get a license. Today actually we had some questions about multifamily. So we did a little bit of additional research on that and we found that out of those 150 there's only 18 that are in multifamily zoning districts and only two of those are actually in multifamily structures. So a very tiny amount that are actually in apartment buildings or multifamily. Just a note um last year's fiscal year we did receive almost 400,000 in transit occupancy tax from these licensed short-term rentals. Here's a a kind of a quick map of generally where they're located kind of be evenly distributed throughout the city. Um those active short-term rentals and inactive short-term rentals that were, you know, originally licensed but didn't get renewed. And then about those 18 sort of multif family and multif family districts with only a couple that are, you know,

actually in apartment building. So very very only two um very limited. couple of photos from our outreach like I mentioned earlier. Um there's the planner with a coffee. I think everyone's kind of bearing down on me there. Um that was a nice nice meeting. No, actually it was really cordial. We had a lot of good conversation. And then our workshop in our foyer that was really good as well. And that's where we were able to get some information back to the public and tell them what we heard at the previous meeting and kind of get that refined down a little bit and really have the one-on-one conversations with folks. So if I was to book um you know as part of that approval process, should there be different enforcement options or parameters for these particular land uses and um communication through our departments here at city hall and could there be a you know a good neighbor brochure or a similar communication that gets out there to say here's how you know how we expect these to operate. So generally if I boil it down these are the points we heard um and some really good ideas that we heard what what's happening in our county in our region. We've also done analysis of what the other communities are doing. Some of the communities around us especially the more uh tourism related communities do have limits. They have caps on the number of of short-term rentals. They have limits on the number of people that can stay in a short-term rental. They do have density or or distance limitations. They do have annual review. Most communities have an annual review or they have a multi-year um permit and they have a permit fee with cost recovery. Um and they it's just one way that they pay for their vendor. You know, they have compliance tracking and tax collection. They pay this third party vendor to do that. And those those third party vendors go out and find the unlicensed ones and bring them into the city so we can you know

easily regulate those. And a lot of communities also have, you know, in order to stay active without losing your grandfathered in status, they have to actually have a minimum number of stays each year and, you know, and have a minimum contribution to the transient occupancy tax, which is a good idea. You don't want someone just to have a placeholder license, especially if you have a cap or a distance limitation, and then they're not active, and then they're preventing others from starting up. They also in these other communities do the written notification to neighbors. Um, and in some cases they require owner occupancy. I know that's something that we've talked about in the past here as well as one of our prime ideas. And then there's the fire and safety inspections. Um, which we right now we do that for new commercial business licenses. Could that happen on a new short-term rental business license? Yes, it could. But we're not doing that now. So, what is the right fit for a task at Arrow? And that's the big question for tonight. What is right for us? Proceed under current policies or lack thereof. Certainly an option. Um, draft an ordinance that has standards, absolutely an option. Draft an ordinance with standards and also establish a permit process with some cost recovery or even for that matter hire a third party vendor. Also an option. Um, so what we wanted to do is also boil it down to a menu of options kind of based on that outreach that we heard. And there's sort of themes here. I'm not going to go through all of these right now, but I suspect that if the council wants to give direction tonight for staff to come back with ordinance, we can use these items and we can use additional ones that we don't have on these lists to start getting ideas for what those could be. So, we have a list that talks about

addressing the overconentration and the impacts to housing stock, a list to address the potential noise and parking issues, and a list to promote accountability, um, such as the items here. So, I'm going to come back to those in just a minute. I do want to bring this up, though. It's Senate Bill 346. That's the short-term render facilitator act of 2025. It's a new state law that does actually allow cities to obtain a lot of information such as the addresses, the APN number, and the listing from all these online short-term rental platforms so that we can get more accountability and reach out to these folks and ensure they're licensed. But in order to utilize that Senate bill, we do have to have an ordinance that specifically establishes that authority. So whether or not we actually adopt a short-term rental ordinance that has policies in it or not, this is a good idea. But of course, this could be wrapped into whatever ordinance we might adopt for short-term rentals as well. So, I'm going to wrap it up. The next steps for us is really what we're asking council tonight is, do you want us to to work on a a short-term rental ordinance based on the criterion that we heard from the community? Uh, if so, we would develop that and we would need to bring it back to planning commission before bringing it back to you. We could also do an extra stop and do additional outreach if you would like as well. I'm going to open it up now to questions and I can go back to the list um if we get there, but I'm just going to have it for questions at this moment. Thank you. Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Dunsmore. Um first I have a procedural question for the legal council. Um, seeing as there's only three of us here, which is of course a quorum of the council itself, um, does that mean we need to agree unanimously on what to do this evening or, uh, could we do a 21 split, which would kind of concern me of having just two council members um, uh, essentially deciding on policy? But what's the what are we facing here rule-wise?

Understood. um you can have a majority of those members on the dis this evening. We'll push forward a recommendation to staff. Um I'll just also reiterate that this is a discussion item. So there will be an opportunity to um once this actually gets put in ordinance format to come back before you uh for discussion and and future app approval. Right. And there certainly as we go further there's the possibility that depending on what we kind of initiate this evening that it could potentially resolve a conflict of interest situation perhaps potentially and we'll evaluate that as it arises.

Right. Okay. I just wanted to clarify that for both my myself and my colleagues here on the on the dis. Okay. Um I'm going to start on my left. C Mayor Promanderas. Do you have questions?

I think I'm just going to start with a comment first. Well, the first comment I want to say is thank That was a question I was going to ask procedurally on the number of votes going to be necessary either now or in the future. Um I'll just start with a comment that I have on on the limiting the number or the distance. My my concern, my biggest concern is in multif family and you know, if there's a an apartment complex currently existing that has several vacancies and the owner wants to utilize that opportunity to um to register those as as short-term rentals, but they happen to be clustered around a long-term individual who's, you know, that's that's their place of residence. I'm just concerned that that is something that could happen and would severely affect their quality of life on something like that. So, I'm I'm just concerned about multif family. And I'm glad to see that that was one of the options of limiting or prohibiting. I'm leaning towards prohibiting, but if it's going to be limited, it's going to I want to see how that's going to go, but we can get into that. Um, and I'm concerned about workforce housing being um affected by short-term rentals being used up in that capacity. Uh, but I'm right I'm not going to I have any questions at this time, but I just want to point that out right now. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks. We can come back to you for questions as well. So, um, and I have questions, but I'll defer first to my right with Council Member Funk.

Yeah. No surprise. I have some questions. Yes. I'm sure I'm sure the mayor does, too. Yes. Okay. Uh, for starters, um, Mr. Dunbar, you mentioned SB 346, which would allow us to get better information, uh, from Airbnb and Verbbo and those kinds of companies and figure out who's renting properties in a Tascadero that doesn't have them licensed. Um, I know that the planning staff has a huge workload right now trying to finish up the general plan and all of the related zoning work uh to the general plan. Um, and so it might take some time, but would it be possible to bring back an ordinance that would allow us to move ahead on SB 346 right away um and or you know very uh soon um and and without having to resolve all these other aspects of this?

Yes, that seems fairly straightforward. Okay. Um note that I would be in favor of that. Um so the big uh there was a big change on the numbers from the sort of 231 total licenses that somebody might have asked about at some point is it was in our staff report uh versus the um thing can you come back to that map?

Yes and discrepancy is really between the number of actual licenses the number of valid licenses. So there's a issued number basic based uh or versus a um what's real out there. So there's a lot of inactive 81 were found to be inactive or delinquent that never got renewed. So when we did our first survey, it was during renewal period this year and that's the number of renewals that went out for short-term rentals, but we realized that all we got back was 132 when they actually renewed them. So those may have historically applied, but they never renewed. So, uh, okay. So, those are properties that had applied previously or were short-term rentals in the past.

Yes. But, correct. Where the property owner did not actively um, so active is based on their licensing status as opposed to um, you know, what's going on out there online in the rental community. Yes. So, if you go on to Airbnb, VBO, etc., etc., you're probably only going to see half of that number, 40, 50 that are active at any one time because people take them on and off the market frequently or during different times of the year, which is a different number than actually what's been issued business licenses. Sure. Which are much higher. So, sure.

That's one of the one of the huge things that people love about this particular use is being able to use to rent out a property when they're, you know, off working a job. somewhere where else or uh taking a grand vacation or those other sorts of things. Okay. Um one of one of the questions with so much you know this is a large level of interest even if it's not a huge number of activives right now and you know quite an acceleration from the 134 or what that were um the the number from uh 2024 um that was reported in the staff report. So that was like um 139 if I recall. Um so if we have that much active interest and people are maybe um putting in placeholders or or thinking about that um rather than having that force us to rapid action um could we could we um grandfather this is a legal question um could we grandfather in properties that were active short-term rentals um prior to the date where this first came to the ordinance was first presented to council. That would have been what? October 2025 or 2024. Okay, sorry. That's right. 2024.

So, I believe that was an aspect of the ordinance that originally came to you a few months ago. There was a grandfathering period um roped into that. So we could do that and you can adjust at at what date that grandfathering um you set that grandfathering provision. Sure. Okay. So that I mean people who were already invest in that before they knew that that we might consider placing some restrictions could be treated in in um a different way than we would treat people who have been piled on afterwards. That's correct. I believe the policy in the last ordinance was that it they would eventually have to come into compliance with the with the current ordinance, but I might be misremembering that

they were grandfathered in as long as they remained active. And we had a stipulation in that original ordinance about um similar to what these other communities were doing is that you've got to uh remain active by um having participation in the program bringing in a transient occupancy tax in the previous quarter. We had basically some thresholds for that. Okay. So, if someone just sat with a business license for 6 months but didn't actually utilize their short-term rental, then they would become inactive and they no longer would be grandfathered in. And I could I'm just saying six months as a random time frame because we could do any time frame.

Yeah. Okay. So, that that's an active li active listing in terms of rental activity as opposed to an active permit in terms of licensing. That's correct.

Okay. Sorry to be pacific about how we're using the language but it get does get confusing. Um okay I want to come back to um some questions with regard to fire safety. I have talked about this from the deis um previously on a number of occasions um about this particular issue um because when we let people who people come into the community as renters um they are definitionally less familiar with thisu community than the people who live here and they're on vacation and they're going to not be as maybe as attentive as um to the consequences of their actions is somebody who's not on vacation. Um, so this raises risks and uh it's easier. It's just too easy for somebody to do something stupid and and start a fire that burns the place down. We have to be attentive to that. Even if it's not a thing that happens real often, it could. So, um, to that to the end of thinking about that, um, I want to come back over to Chief Bryson here on this question. Um if we were to um put some regulations as we see in some other high fire risk areas uh that limit guests um ability to have open fires and you know woodf fired stoves and uh bonfires, campfires, those kinds of open things or charcoal things that anything that casts embers. Um, would the fire department be okay with us allowing gas grills and gas fire pits or propane? You know, that

Yeah, thank you for the question. I think the fire department would be just fine with that. I think if we um eliminated, you know, like a a backyard burn pit outside, we wouldn't want, you know, um wood fire, campfire. I think we could um have an ordinance that says we don't allow that, but a propane barbecue or propane gas fire pit would be acceptable to the fire department. Okay. And is that something that would be reasonably easy to check for during an initial inspection at the time that that um an operator gets a permit to run the places in Airbnb?

That may be a question for Director Dunmore. I'm not sure on the process of the permitting. We typically do not inspect uh short-term rentals currently, but I think on the permit process we could factor that in. Is it? Yes. Okay. That could be done by the building people as opposed to the fire people. Yes.

Got it. Okay. Just trying to to see if we have a process to enforce it that would be simple and um not too burdensome on everybody involved. Okay. um is um if we were to establish some standards about guest behavior or some things that we want rental guests to know like how to evacuate in the event of a wildfire and where to get information. Um, also, uh, what our local fireworks ordinance is, um, you know, and and the good neighbor policies, whatever that we might want to have communicated. Would it be possible to have an agreed upon, you know, set of things to be communicated, a text that the city puts up, say, on a on its website, and that operators would then be responsible for getting to uh, their guests in some fashion. Yes, that was one of the sort of ideas in the menu is to have this handout that's required for each of the owners to give to each of the renters and it's something that we have in our, you know, we could create in our ordinance that already has a draft set of standards that we want to be conveyed. So, that's a very simple thing to do. You can give it out. Um, but then again, there's human behavior. So,

right. Well, there there is human behavior, but at least you start out by making sure that there's information And then the the closing of the loop would be um is there a way to have in uh if uh a neighbor observes a violation of those standards because the neighbors would need to get that information too. And you know, if the neighbor observes the um you know, somebody uh lighting a bonfire next door that they're not supposed to do in a short-term rental that uh um would there would be a would there be a mechanism that they could call um if we require a local contact, they would have to call that local contact or for certain violations could directly call the police. Yes, these are all options that we have.

Okay. Um and then uh for parking, if we set a m a required amount of of parking or require that the parking be onsite um and that they have enough on-site parking to handle the expected load of guests, say, you know, one per bedroom or something similar. Um, would it be feasible when you go out and do an inspection at the the time of permitting for some to allow use of on of street parking? If it happens to be in an area where there's extra space on side of the road, it's not going to be in anybody's way. It's not going to harm anybody. you could have an except a practical exception that that it actually works without inconveniencing the neighbors or creating safety hazards.

Yes, typically we'd require that they have a certain amount of on-site parking, but if the council wanted to be more flexible and say that, you know, some guest parking may be in the street in particular areas where that's satisfactory, that's also an option. So, you can put in whatever you want. The typical single family residence has a parking requirement of two parking spaces and most of them have two parking spaces plus two two guests available. So most of them do have four on site.

Okay. Um you know because that's always the the challenge that if neighbors we have we have so many streets that do not have street parking um or where people who show up and there's no place to put their car, they're going to put their car someplace anyway. um that you get create problems along the side of the road and vehicles in in spaces that are unsafe and create traffic hazards and drive everybody nuts. Okay. Um one uh last thing for right now. Um one of the things that I find so attractive is the with this is the the chance people have to handle uh family sort of transitions, people who already live here. So if we were to um create a process uh if we if we apply limits of some fashion either number or proximity to how many o overall uh short-term rentals we have would it be possible to have a simple exception process um that was administrator not doesn't go to the planning commission or us but is administratively handled um to for somebody for the owner or of a who who's somebody who is for this house where the house is their primary resident or the representative of that owner to uh come in and get a timelimited permit to use the place as an Airbnb um to handle family situations. Um, what I'm looking for is the general con the general spirit of grandma has a stroke. She's going to be in rehab for six months. She might be a be able to be well enough to come back to that house, but we don't know. And meanwhile, renting it out as an Airbnb, if you spiff it up, uh, would create enough

revenue that you can afford to do the renovations grandma needs to move back into that house. That's the sort of thing that's supports our residents in managing their lives and staying connected with this community um that um I'd like to see us find a way to accommodate. And so I just want to know if we did that, can that be done without it being um excessively burdensome or creating too much arm twisting to you guys?

Yes, that's very feasible. What I'm hearing from you is that you would make a suggestion that you would have more flexible standards in density and concentration for a residence that is their primary residence that's generally owner occupied and that they would apply for administrative use permit to exceed, you know, the density in their neighborhood and therefore be able to get a a short-term rental permit. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah, that's roughly it. So, get it a short-term rental period, you know, permit that runs for a year and maybe you can renew it for a year if circumstantials continue and then you can't keep doing it forever, but it might, you know, or maybe you renew it long enough that the proate the state can be probated in those kinds of situations so that people can deal with those um transition moments, intergenerational. Yes. Okay. Thank you. That'll that'll do me for right now.

All right. Thank you. Um I have a couple questions and follow on that though is I mean when we talk about some of these things, they only would come into play if we had a cap on rent number of rentals, short-term rentals or distance limitations. If we don't have those two things, then some of these things wouldn't apply. Correct. They wouldn't need to we wouldn't need to address them because they wouldn't u be an issue. Is that fair analysis? Okay, got it. Um, so I and the one you know who actually for multiple years asked to put this item on the agenda

and then in 2024 we had a consensus at strategic planning to put it on the agenda and uh and you outlined where we've been since then. Um, and my thought process had always or my concern had always been uh houses that are essentially only used as short-term rentals because if they're only used as short-term rentals and they're not used as dwellings, I had two concerns. One is that's not that's a house that's not available to a resident of a Tascadero to live in. uh it's not available for let's say as a move up home for a a young growing or medium growing family you know that would like to move up to a higher a higher priced home it's not available to them because it's taken out of housing inventory that was one concern but the other primary concern was that essentially a home that is only used as a rental is effectively a hotel or a commercial lodging establishment in a residential neighborhood and I concerned that that's not what our neighbors sign up for when they buy a single family home. So, that being said, I did not really consider the multif family issue. And when I look and that's why I asked this morning and I and I'm very pleased that you gave the answer that of how many actual multifamilies do we have? And Willie, we have 18 in multif family zones, but all but two of those are really effectively houses that happen to be in multif family zones. Correct. Yes, that's correct.

We only have two, you know, short-term rental permits, business permits that actually are utilizing a multif family structure and they're actually just duplexes. They're not apartment buildings really. Understand? Yes. And so what I'm getting at there want to understand I was looking at in this staff report you know you have this very eye challenging little I'm sorry in like size three font size three font yeah

and as I get older that's harder to read um and what I was having difficulty seeing on this so my question is with other communities as near as I can see with my you know declining vision ision. Um, I don't see any reference to how multif family is handled in these other communities in the county. Did you can you address how it is? I don't know that they parsed those out and I don't know that we did that level. I'm wondering if one of our, you know, both a couple of our planners are here. I wonder if they had any of that info that they parsed out. And, you know, if you do, come on up. But if you didn't, then yeah, I mean,

oh, Eric, Eric Gomez, our associate planner, would love to have. understand from the city manager who had been the city manager in Pismo Beach that they allowed multi- family STRs in a certain you know kind of beachfront tourist oriented zone but otherwise not but I'm wondering about the other communities.

Yeah, generally um there are limitations uh on multifamily zones. Um there are and I'm not going to specify exactly which cities but there are some that just do not allow it. Um there are some that limit them just to hosted or owner occupied rentals where essentially it's a room share or a homeay as they're called. Um but there are typically stronger limitations to multifamily uh residences that kind of offer more control of the guests.

Okay? Because I mean on the one hand you know one would look at our multif family and say hey you know this is our workforce housing and you know we shouldn't be having it be utilized as STRs but on the other hand two uh tells me we don't have a problem is what I would see and that's why I wonder what other communities do cuz it seems to me that it it sounds like other than the occasional person wanting to rent out a spare bedroom in a you know in a two-bedroom place or something this really on multif family side really doesn't seem to be an issue.

Correct. Yeah. In our city, we have two units right now that are uh in a multifamily structure. Um they're both duplexes. I believe there are three units that are um single family residences where there's like an apartment building in the back also, but they wanted to keep that uh single family residence up front and those are rented also.

Got it. Okay. cuz I I I don't you know want to be I I wanted to consider this entire issue before it became a big problem. But on the other hand, I don't want to, you know, try to come up with a solution where there's not a problem, you know, a solution in search of a problem. So, I'm kind of inclined to think that perhaps the multif family aspect, even though Mayor Portm, you know, brought up a fair concern, I'm just not seeing that it's a doesn't seem by the numbers to be a significant issue. So, okay. So, thank you for that. Um, in terms of, uh, council indicated in answer to a question, we we could choose a grandfather date. I mean it could be today. It could be August when the planning commission looked at the draft ordinance. It could be October 24 when we discussed it. That could be any time we would choose. Correct.

That's correct.

Yeah. So um and then when we currently we don't do as the fire chief noted any inspection. I mean you get your business license say I want to run a STR um get a business license for it. Sign up to pay the transient occupancy tax and really that's all we do. So we don't currently inspect. Um and in the uh ordinance draft ordinance and presented to the planning commission in August, there was mention of that there could be an application and inspection fee that could be in the range of $800 to $1,100. And that seems pretty high because my objective here isn't to charge a lot of fees. you just apply some control for the benefit of neighbors. Um what would be the basis of that being that high if you will? Those numbers were derived um assuming one to two inspections of a property and also assuming the use of a thirdparty vendor to find the additional um rentals may be out there and to help with the collection of transient occupancy tax and to have a sort of an application process online. And so we're finding that a lot of other communities are charging fees around that level so they can have cost recovery for that third party vendor and to do their inspections. So, that's not just solely the inspection when we throw out a number like that. There's other pieces to that story.

Do do we not don't we already use a third party vendor to identify listings that don't have licenses?

One of our vendors that currently works with our finance team does some of that work and and perhaps our finance director can fill in what that consultant currently does in that endeavor. And they offer additional services, but we're not using the full extent of their services. Um we did actually have some services that the T bid board was paying for. Um those have been um terminated for a a year, couple years maybe. And we do currently use HDL for companies for collection of toot. And they do offer a service as part of our contract. We're not currently paying for that service, but we could engage them or others like them to do that um searching process.

Okay. I thought part of the premise of h uh paying for that kind of service was that the in some cases they didn't charge very much because they took a cut of the additional revenue that you know we got if they ferited out people who weren't properly licensed who then had to pay toot and a rears or um that's not currently the way that our contract is structured. Okay. Could it be um we could either negotiate, renegotiate with HDL or negotiate with a different contractor for sure. Okay.

Um and along those lines, if through this process we because right now if we discover that, you know, this person has an STR listing on Airbnb or VBO and they don't have a license with us and they haven't been paying toot right now. That's simply just an ordinance violation with a simple, you know, $100 to then a $200 fine. And under an ordinance like this, we could charge a much greater fine because that's who we're looking for is the people who are doing this illegally. So, we could have I mean, right now, we we there's hardly any penalty for doing this on the side, right? Based on what I'm hearing,

not really much of a penalty. No, our goal instead of a penalty would be actually to uh have them come in and get the business license and register for toot. I don't think we would issue them a citation right off the bat unless they didn't comply, right? But I mean, do we even have a mechanism of then trying to figure out how much they owe us in back bed tax? If we can find out how long they've been operating, I suppose we could go after that, but that would be a whole another legal avenue to have to go down. So, as part of an ordinance like this though, we could uh put in the framework penalties for failure to obtain a proper business license and failure to pay to penalties with teeth. Correct.

Certainly, you can put your own enforcement mechanisms into an ordinance like we have in a lot of our provisions in our municipal code. Yes.

You could also you could also have that person be invalidated from getting a license for a couple years, right? uh while they had to sit it out uh or if they had a license they could lose it for a couple years. I'm pleased too with Senate Bill 346. I think we'll see as this gets enacted and and rolls out into implementation. This allows us to ask online platforms like Airbnb Airbnb and VBO to share their listing data and I would think we could get some historical data from that and so we could actually use that historical data to see if a person had been renting and what tax they had or hadn't been paying. So I think we have an addition tool. I mean, if we find out somebody's been doing this and they, you know, they owe us $5,000 of toot, uh, that's a the biggest piece, but b, there should be some penalty for them having to fail failed to pay the play the game properly. Um, you know, i.e. pay up or, you know, your license is suspended until you pay up and then you're alien eligible for a period of time or what have you. But that could be included in any ordinance we've pushed. Right.

Okay. I'm I have more questions. I'm going to let you go ahead. Looks like you have a related question.

Yeah. U question would be since the people we really want to have pay that you know pen pay for the service that finds the scoff laws who are skating on the system are the scoff laws who are skating on the system not the legitimate owners that are paying their toot. Uh, is it possible to set up a cost recovery or or a um a a fine process so that if we catch you not having registered and not having paid toot that that you would have to pay extra into the uh so that the cost of of looking for those folks would be paid by those those people ultimately in you know not necessarily precisely but in sort of general it's possible for us to set up a a fee or fine that I suppose that's that's one way to to look at it. It'd probably be better to have a a cost recovery that's spread across all of the applicants, but that's one way to certainly do that. And I think it's part of a penalty process really is what you're

Yeah. I sort of alluding to my model for that would be what we do with the uh weed abatement fees. Oh. where the weed abatement the pro the cost of surveying everybody for their weed abatement is paid for by the people who didn't debate their weeds and not paid for by the people who did

regarding deal yeah regarding penalties on short-term rentals I think and you know my former life was a place where there were a lot of these the privilege to use your home as income and and I think that's something the council's weighing this evening and I think um the the biggest penalty is losing the privilege that's always the biggest people do not want to lose the ability to rent their home if they're caught or behind in pay. You can always have back fees for toot. I think though a note on on fines, and this is important because there's so much money exchanged in this type of uh use, you need to make sure that just standard municipal code fines of $100 or $250 don't cut it because they become a cost of doing business. And so, usually you can see fines in these areas of a thousand, thousands of dollars. We had a case in my uh former role uh that a person was illegally renting and we went to court and and they were issued a judgment in five figures of fines and that held and so it was tens of thousands of dollars and so these are held in court in our county if you set the fine system right. So that is another option.

I'll also just add that state law has increased fines for um short-term rentals violations related to health and safety. So, uh, the state authorizes that. So, opposed to your 100, 250, 500, you're looking at 1,500, 3,000, and 5,000 for those, um, subsequent violations. So, that also increases the penalties, um, when you're looking at health and safety violations related to short-term rentals. Okay. Thank you. And, and on the line of, you know, inspecting the properties, I didn't catch it on here, but, um, are we the only ones that let somebody open up an STR without any inspection? No, no. There are city of pathals, they don't have inspections, for example.

Okay, that's good to know for comparison purposes. Okay, I actually have a few more questions, but what what I'd like to do is open it up to public comment. I'd like to hear uh people from the public speak on this item and then because some of my further questions really fall, you know, kind of lean into comments a little bit. Um, and I think since this is a situation where council is just going to be providing guidance for a potential ordinance, um, we can kind of talk through some of that. So, I'd like to open it up to the to public input and um, of course, let council members Peak and Newsome know that now would be the time to come back up and make their public comment uh, as citizens. But if you were interested in making public comment, please approach the podium and uh, if you would and don't wait for the everybody in front of you to finish speaking. Go ahead. First speaker, approach the podium if you would. And you everybody, you have three minutes and please state your name for the record. Sarah Majellet, owner of Templeton Vacation Rentals. I'm also a member of the AT bid. Um, I appreciate first of all the workshop that we just had recently. I thought that was well attended and was they really did seek out some great feedback. It was um great to see so many people there. Um including some of our council members. So that was I really um encourage that that type of outreach. Um I think that all of us there felt very heard. So I appreciate that. some of the comments that I would like to highlight here um regarding um street parking. I as an operator, as someone who manages 30 properties, most of them in the north county, including several here in Atascadero, um I don't I think that you can say no street parking. If the facility if the unit the home doesn't have enough parking for the people they're inviting and they're they're sharing with, then

they need to rethink their business model. So, I think saying no street parking is totally acceptable. And I am just speaking for myself. I don't want to say that I'm speaking for any other operators or hosts, but I think that is a totally reasonable thing. Um, regarding fire safety, I just I think it's important that we don't let any kind of um creep here. You can't say that people can't have a fire and a fire pit in their backyard if they have a fire pit in their backyard. That's opening yourself up to legal um I mean, where's where's the slippery slope there? Now we can't have a hot tub or a swimming pool. I don't want us to react too severely to the incident that happened last summer where apparently it was a short-term rental and it was a gusty day and the barbecue blew some embers. That's the story I heard. That could happen to anybody if we again we can't let's not try to create a problem create a solution for a problem we don't have. Fire safety is important. I would say it's not more or less important to the guests that have been coming to Atascadero for decades but that was a scary incident last summer. Um but I don't want to make sweeping decisions about private property usage based on that incident. Um, am I doing on time here? Uh, no. I say no multif family. That's your workforce housing. Let's present, if we're going to do a limit on the number of licenses, let's present our best product. Let's get tourists here staying in the most beautiful homes that Tascadero has to offer. And let's save the multif family housing for the workforce because we need them. Thank you.

Thank you. Uh, next speaker, please. Good evening, mayor. Oops, sorry. I'm gonna tip it over. Good evening, uh, mayor and council members. My name is Rennell Porter, and I'm a resident of Atascadero. I'm not here to argue for or against short-term rentals as a concept. I'm here to ask that environmental risk and community safety be central to your decision. A taskadero sits in a high and very high fire hazard region. Land use decisions in that context carry consequences beyond individual properties. Full-time residents understand defensible spaces, red flag conditions, and evacuation routes. Visitors by definition are unfamiliar with these realities. That difference matters in a fireprone, wildfirprone community. As you evaluate short-term rentals, I encourage you to consider the cumulative environmental impacts, including wildfire exposure. Increased turnover in peak occupancy in high fire hazard areas can complicate evacuation and emergency response. Infrastructure compatibility. Many neighborhoods, particularly those near open space, were designed for lowdensity residential living, not transient lodging. Narrow roads and limited evacuation evacuation routes should be carefully evaluated. Emergency response strain, higher occupancy, and unfamiliar guests can increase call volume and coordination challenges during peak seasons and red flag events. Water consumption. Studies have shown that short-term rentals often use more water per guest night than hotels, largely due to frequent linen turnover, laundry cycles, and higher shortst stay consumption patterns. In a droughtprone

region, cumulative demand matters. Insurance markets instability, wildfire risk is affecting is already affecting homeowners across California. My own insurance was recently cancelled and replacement cost coverage cost roughly three times as much as we had been paying. Risk exposure affects the entire community. These are not abstract concerns. They are practical realities in a fireprone region. If short-term rentals are permitted or expanded, I urge you to incorporate safeguards in high fire hazard areas, require clear evacuation information for guests, and evaluate infrastructure capacity along with policy changes. Environmental stewardship in a taskadero is not ideological. It is responsible governance in the face of real environmental constraints. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please.

My name is Kay Porter. I'm a resident of a Tascadero. I've lived more or less all over the county since 1994. I'm basically I'm I'm for short-term rentals, but I want them to have restrictions. Uh without restrictions, we have no recourse when something does happen. So I want us to and you have been thinking ahead about what kind of restriction to put in. I would like to have no corporate owners. Only residents of Atascadero can have a short-term rental. If you want a long-term rental, buy yourself a hotel. the um I think that they need to give the renters some instructions like um teenagers have a tendency to build fire pits wherever they want to and regardless of and they're just unaware and it should be prohibited by the landlord and um and they shouldn't go and buy a barbecue grill for the weekend so that they have a big barbecue that that should not be allowed. The landlord should have if they want something like that, the landlord should supply a propane fire pit or something of that ilk. Um, I think that the fire department should require a short-term rental to have a defensible area. Not all homeowners do, but being a short-term rental puts them in a special group. So, they should have they should operate to different standards. The house I live in has has shrubbery right up against the house. I don't think a short-term rental should be allowed to do that. And uh they should also have posted evacuation routes.

the on a different subject. Um, there's nothing to make your uh neighbors more angry than overparking an area. that they should be required to have on-site parking only and they should be told not to have visitors parking on the street because um I have grandchildren that lived in slow near the the the college and believe me they can overwhelm a street and um I also worry about the noise but I don't know that there's a whole lot we can do about it. I'm sure the police have their standards and that we could call in. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

My name is Tori Keane. I'm here to express my concerns regarding short-term vacation rentals in Atascadero. At a recent planning commission meeting, one argument presented was that vacation rentals bring meaningful business to Atascadero. However, based on my own review of listings which I provided to the city council earlier today, many properties heavily market proximity to Pasarro's wine country, St. Louis Abyispo, and nearby beach towns rather than highlighting a Tascadero itself. In fact, of eight recent reviews I examined, not I'm sorry, the not reviews, its descriptions of the properties, five did not meaningfully mention a Tascadero at all. This strongly suggests that many visitors are using these properties primarily as lodging while spending the bulk of their time and money outside our city. In that sense, short-term rentals do not appear to generate substantially more local economic benefit than traditional hotels. Meanwhile, the financial gains from these properties flow primarily to the individual owners, often those fortunate enough to own multiple homes, while the broader community absorbs the impacts. Every home converted to a full-time short-term rental is one less home available to local families and workers in an already constrained housing market. Housing data underscores this concern. Like much of St. Louis Abyspo County, Atascadera faces limited housing supply and rising costs. The California Department of Housing and Community Development has assigned local jurisdictions aggressive regional housing needs allocations or Rhina targets to address statewide shortages. At the same time, rental vacancy rates in the region have remained tight and home prices have risen significantly over the past several years, putting home ownership further out of reach for many working families. When existing housing stock is diverted into short-term rentals, it directly conflicts with the community's obligation to expand, not reduce, long-term housing availability by limiting options for home ownership beyond starter homes. I want to be clear that my position is not anti-visittor or anti- tourism. I

have personally used short-term rentals when traveling with my family and I understand the appeal, particularly the convenience of having a kitchen. However, Atascadero has already approved at least two long um hotel type lodging projects that include kitchen facilities, which helps address that need without permanently removing housing from the local market. I've also heard the reasonable point that whole home rentals can accommodate larger families and groups. While that demand is real, it must be balanced against the needs of the people who live and work in Atascadero year round. Our first responsibility should be preserving housing stability and neighborhood integrity for residents of Atascadero. For these reasons, I support the original proposal that came before the planning commission in August. They included approval of a short-term rental permit, issuance of a business license, annual permit and license renewal with compliance standards, occer occupancy requirements, a 247 local contact for emergencies, posted public notice prior to permit approval, meaningful penalty fees, and permit revocation authority. And I also included that original thing in my email earlier today. I don't have enough time for the rest of my comment. So, thank you very much.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Hello. I'm Kathy Reid. I'm a resident of a Tascadero. Um, and I just have a few comments. I too use short-term rentals on vacation and love them. Um, I have lived close to one here. Um there weren't any serious problems, but all the neighbors were very concerned about the noticeable noise and increased traffic and parking. Uh the house did sell uh to a regular owner and so we were kind of relieved. Um but I really worry about our scarce housing supply and the troubling reports of of corporations buying up housing to use as short-term rentals. And I would hate to see that happen here, both because we need the housing and if somebody's going to make money off of this service to the community, I'd rather it just be regular people who actually live here. I also worry about the fire risk. I think there should definitely be restrictions on the number and the type and the quality of units. And I think it makes sense to inspect and permit all existing units, even if they're grandfathered in, uh, to have some control over that, as well as some kind of annual review. And I'm also strongly in favor of hosted versus unhosted units as a priority to be considered in the numbers. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker. Familiar face,

Heather Newsome. It's been a while since I stood on this side. I don't know if I can conform to three minutes. So, here we go. Um, I get to represent myself as a rental um, vacation, short-term rental and vacation out of the area Airbnb. I do have experience over the years to knowing what it takes to operate as well as to interact with my neighbors. So, I speak on that behalf. I think it's important to maintain residents property rights. Our ordinance that we all cannot seem to agree on should be something that is practical, not restrictive. We should be able to use our properties the way we choose. Some of us choose it as a means of retirement income. I would rather have an Airbnb than deal with eviction process. Uh dealing with tenants can be very expensive and very time consuming. Our eviction took almost a year. Um, I think it's important to be flexible in use of a property that fits an owner's needs. That can change from year to year depending on that purpose. A grandfather clause you mentioned is for those that are currently active. You spoke about having inactive short-term rentals of 81. Um, what you're not aware of is the noticing that went out to the existing Airbnbs went from a paper notice to an email notice. So, I'm not sure if the city has contacted those 81 people that did not renew to see if they just didn't get it in their spam. Fees should be reasonable. I don't think it's affordable for us to pass on a third party vendor um to our short-term rental owners. It's too costly to pass on to residents. They already struggle with expensive cost of living property taxes. I think it's important that we can come to agreeance that there is some clarity that will come with SB 364 and I think sometimes if we can't come to an agreeance that's super restrictive perhaps we wait and get guidance from

those that are getting ready to mandate it. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Next speaker please. Seth Peak, Tascadero resident, property owner. Uh, to be clear, I do not operate an Airbnb. I don't plan on it. I used to eight years ago. Don't recommend it to anybody else. I was a homeay. My wife and I did homeay, meaning we rented a room in our house for three years to pay for half our mortgage. I think Airbnb is a great thing for someone who uh can do it within the confines of policy and ordinance. I think it's important if we do policy as a citizen, as a as a resident of Atascadero, I want my I want my city to be to create policy on issues that are rampantly issues. Um, we had connectivity issues downstairs, so I couldn't hear the whole uh report, but I I wasn't sure and I don't expect an answer right now if we had a clear um a clear idea of how many police calls we get for noise complaints. I do understand that the main issues I hear from people is you know parties, pools, kears, parking on these SFRs. I think having multif family, creating a policy for multif family when we have zero uh issues with multif family is just creating policy for policy sake and I'm against that most of the time. So, I'm just here to say that uh as a person who lives in an SFR neighborhood, owns a multif family unit, you know, different areas in town, that I don't think we need to create a policy for an area um that doesn't seem to have an issue with two people duplexes. Uh we have other multif family owners that used to have Airbnb in their building and decided to go to long form because it made more financial sense. So, I don't think we see the trend the other way. Um, during COVID, we had a boom. Everyone

was traveling all the time and Airbnbs were getting a lot of more popular. Nowadays, with a 6% mortgage rate, you're not going to be able to turn a task or house into an Airbnb that pencils out unless you have a really long game and lots of cash. So while there might be rules and regulations necess nec necessary for people to enjoy their habitation, their house, I think multifamilies there's it's it's pointless at this time to create policy for an area that doesn't warrant it at all. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Good evening. Jeff Hosel, um resident here. I don't technically have any skin in the game for Airbnb. I've never done it. Um I do have regular rental property and my points are this. Some of the uh problems that have been um brought up by staff and their outreach and council in your outreach is really simple. Um we have noise complaints with a few people. We have issues with a few of our Airbnbs. Why add more regulation? Why don't we add enforcement? We already have things on the books. We have noise ordinances. I believe they're nine or 10 o'clock at night, but they're never addressed. Um, our code enforcement is slow to enforce and our police are tied up. I think uh adding more regulation is not feasible. I'd like to know which council members on the stand actually have had donations from hotel years because I think some of this regulation is pushed from hotel folks. Um although I do uh when I have family or parties book hotels and get great rates and whatnot in this town, I think it's fine. Um but I also have some families that can't stay in a hotel room. This has been brought up before. They need an Airbnb. When I was a kid, we had a wasn't called Airbnb at the time. We stayed at a house in Sunnyville with a couple of our families in a swimming pool and had a great time. I don't remember it being out of control. Um, as far as one of our speakers who is the at the time was the chair, I don't know if she still is or not, of our planning commission, I think uh those comments are with prejudice. Uh we had problems at that planning commission and uh once again I don't know if all those comments are valid. Um

the other things I would put in is um is this the next step to be like the city at the south? What are we going to do next? Ask for a uh rental registry have to pay for a rental registry. Are we going to put in rent control next? We already have it with the state. I don't see the need for the regulation. And I see the need to enforce what we already have in code on the books. And I do agree with the new state law that you should pass that ordinance so you can have access so we're not missing our TN toot tax. Lastly, um I know our city attorney is not here tonight, a regular one. That's not David sitting over there. I'd like to know the name of our city attorney. I think that's a fair uh thing because that marker does not have the name. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Next speaker, please.

Good evening. My name is Tom Foran and I'm a resident of Atascadera for over 40 years and I want to thank the uh planning department for having their workshops. I attended both of them and um I'm an unhappy neighbor and I met several other people that have the similar situation and we have a swimming pool next door which happens to be 50 ft from my master bedroom window and the primary people that come to our the B&B Airbnb next door are young families which is fine but there's another group that are young adults and they come in to enjoy uh the central coast. They go out partying and when they come home at night on a warm summer night, they want to go in the pool. And this goes on at 2 in the morning. It goes on at midnight and I've complained and the cla the complaints go to the people that that made the noise, but they don't come back again. So, there's really no enforcement for the noise that I experience. Nobody. I I can't call anybody. Uh, who do I complain to? So, that's my unhappy neighbor story. And there were several other people that also had swimming pool issues with um inebriated young adults and I was one of them. Thank you.

Thank you. Uh, next speaker, please. Please, if anybody else wishes to speak, please come towards the podium now.

Hi, I'm I'm Lewis Soloff. I live in a Tascadero and I I have a short-term permit in another city, actually another state. And this I guess what I'm going to say is sort of relevant to that. There was an issue that came up here about the the placeholder license, people getting licenses and just sort of sitting on them. Well, I guess I' I've had a placeholder license in this other jurisdiction. And I got it because it was my assumption when when the short-term rental program began that eventually because of mission creep um that that that they would just become unavailable at some point. So I fig well I better rush in here and get this and pay my in that cases still over $300 a year and and keep this alive in a kind of morb but alive state. So, um, so I I don't think that's such a bad thing for some because people need to plan for the retirement. So, say you're planning for your retirement and you assume that, you know, your your house is your major asset and you're going to be able to actually get some return on the rental market and then you can imagine that just as you get ready to retire, they change the rules. Um, so so I don't think that's that's so bad. Um, I I haven't lived here that long. I've lived here for about eight years and one of the things that drew me here was the unregulated nature of this area and I realized that that has drawbacks but I I thought that was rather charming and when I talked to my friends about how wonderful a Tascadero is this is the first thing that I mentioned okay sometimes it seems a little chaotic but they're not overregulating uh I'm from Los you know more recently I've lived in Los Angeles um the mission creep in in the jurisdiction I'm not going to mention where it is but it's anyway Right. Um, it started out that I would just every year I would write write a check and I would mail it to the short-term office and I would note the uh my address and that was the extent of my effort. Well,

the latest renewal and I'm continuing to renew this in its dormant state um requires that I list every single person who came through the entire year exactly who they are, what days they stayed, um exactly how much they paid. And I'm and I'm this this is just one of like 14 new requirements. So I guess I would object because I can foresee the mission creep that's going to happen and it's just never going to end. At least it didn't there. Um and I guess I'd like to I mean they they actually had it to the point in this latest renewal where it was requirement on the part of people who are trying to renew their short-term license. they had to go on the city GIS site, geographic information system, the GIS site, and actually figure out how to extract um data for a 200, you know, foot radius map. Um, you know, all the all the 30 or 40 addresses that are involved. They had to uh they had to do this on their own. And I mean, I'm I'm a surveyor. I do this stuff all the time. And it was daunting for me. I couldn't imagine how a normal citizen would have actually been able to deal with that. Now they're all of a sudden a city worker. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm running. Time is up if you could. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comments.

All right. Seeing nobody else approach, uh we're going to close public comment on this item. I don't know why the slide says community forum, but uh and then um I'm going to bring it back to the council. Uh keeping in mind that, you know, our purpose this evening is to provide guidance to staff. We're not here to write an ordinance per se, you know, so we don't need to get into too much detail. I think we need to provide feedback to staff on what a would do we want to see an STR ordinance and b what features would we want it to include. And so um you know like I for one I kind of agree that the multif family even though people who run them think it's okay to say no multif family I just don't see that as an issue with only two examples in the city uh in a duplex. Again, I go with the concept of we don't need to regulate something that's not a problem. Um, we always could go back later if that became a problem. So, that for example, I'm just using that as an example of one thing where my objective is of course keep whatever we do as simple and clear-cut as possible. What I'd like to ask my two colleagues up here to do is first kind of go through uh some of the features. And if you still have questions, that's fine. But to kind of go through um let's talk about, you know, do we kind of go down the list. Do we need an ordinance? Um and I'll start with Council Member Funk.

Sure. I want to uh start uh by just letting folks know, I know that uh we have, you know, colleagues that aren't up here with us um who whose conflicts relate to properties that they they own or presumably do. Um, and that's so if you know if you feel like you know they're not here to to speak for you, recognize we're listening. We're listening to everyone. I take every everyone's things. And one of the things I learned from being at the workshop myself, you know, and and in other conversations is is is the the uh yin and yang to the the mayor's comment about wanting to, you know, expecting that that as a property owner that that somebody won't turn the the place next to you into a commercial um uh um rental commercial u property, commercial establishment. uh the people who really like being able to um own these properties, manage these these properties, develop um this aspect of showing off a task um and like what it does. So there are benefits to allowing this and it also as I commented earlier in my questions as I noted it's really great for managing a lot of life situations. you know, whether you're a young couple starting out and renting the, you know, the other half of the duplex or your room so that you can uh afford the the mortgage or you have, you know, whatever or you have a family in transition or grandma's in, you know, getting in rehab. Uh it's all of those things are really helpful. So I think that it's worth our thinking about what the how do we manage the things that are the downsides because this is the

community that we create together is the goose that lays this golden egg. I mean it's a golden egg. It's a very profitable use of property. Uh but as council members our number one job is to look after the health of the goose, not to try to let more people grab golden eggs. um we have to the goose first. So we have to care for the the the nature of the whole community and within that context looked for are there ways we can allow people to pursue this use that don't um whether the the impacts on that on other folks in the community can be reasonably managed without a huge load of bureaucracy without a ton of cost without it getting convoluted. um with and with something that is reasonably enforcable so that the neighborhood neighbors who experience this impact um know who to call, what to do and can get some accountability for it and there are real consequences to somebody if they have if they create a situation that is um problematic. So anyway, that's that's kind of the general thing where I come from and I also think that the we'll come back to the fire risk thing. I do want to talk about that.

So, you're saying, you know, you do think we need an ordinance of some sort? I think I think we need an ordinance. I think if we've had enough growth in in this and this is also precisely the kind of thing where if we wait until it's a big problem, it is too late to manage it. Uh we can't. So, we have to anticipate the potential for issues when the operator of the short-term rental takes in the benefits and the costs are incurred by other people in the community. We have to be the ones to anticipate that and deal with it.

Okay. Thank you, Mayor Pandereas. Just if you could address the, you know, just we'll go through each thing. So, yes, I absolutely think we need to have an ordinance on this to um hate to use the word regulate, but yes, I think I there needs to be some guidance on how short-term rentals are going to be used. Um my feeling is um the more Airbnb the more Airbnbs become popular and start to compete with the hotels, the more um places like multif family uh dwellings are going to start to be used. And that's going to have a serious effect, like I said, on uh the quality of life for people that are living there and and have limited choices of where else they can go. Um, young people in particular, when they're on vacation for a week, week and a half, whatever it might be, it's a 24-hour party, and I and I get that. I mean, the older I get, it's it might be a 24-hour party, but it's a lot more tame. So, I'm not going to keep my neighbors up. I might not be out till 2 o'clock in the morning. But if I'm in if I'm I haven't stayed in an Airbnb, but if I did and I was in a a city where I've got family and hey, come on over. We'll play cards and and do whatever, we could be up till late at night and if the music's playing or if the windows open, it's a nice warm day and we're talking loud. It happens. one of the speakers here, sir. Sorry, I don't remember your name, but my neighbors um were on vacation and were gone for uh several days with less than a week, but more than three or four days. So, they had some young people staying to watch the house. And I had exactly that same thing. It was summertime. The windows were open for my bedroom at night. Right across the fence was their pool. And these kids were it was loud and screaming and jumping in the pool. And u I had to call I had to call and tell them to cut it out. And my neighbors felt bad about it. But these kids, they were just having fun. They didn't realize that they were making so much noise that it was affecting the neighbors. And if my neighbors were to move to another house and and and have

that house that's next to me used as a short-term rental in that capacity, I would not be happy about it because it's it is a nice house. Now, it's a big house, so it probably wouldn't be used for something like that, but it is possible. One quick story that I will relay. um a client that I had that I was designing their house on 40 acres. So the the neighbor's house was probably on 40 plus acres and maybe a couple hundred feet from the property line. The house that I was designing was more than a couple hundred feet from the property line. So we're talking three or 4 hundred feet apart. That property was being used as the short-term rental um for executives. It was probably a eight or nine,000 or square eight or 9,000 square foot house. $10,000 a weekend and it was parties and it was loud and it was a lot of music and ultimately ultimately my clients decided not to build their house because they didn't want to live next door to something like that. They were breaking the CCR or the the the laws or the rules of the HOA but they had no enforcement mechanism to be able to get them to stop. So, so, so it does happen. So, I am concerned about that. So, I think we need to be concerned about our our residents that do live in Atascadero. Um, long-term residents that are want to stay here and think about them first. I appreciate the income that short-term rentals bring the owner and I also appreciate the revenue that it brings to the city. The toot tax, but I think we need to prioritize what's most important and quality of life is what's most important, especially for the people that live here. So, yes, I am in favor of an ordinance.

Thank you. And I think that's a, you know, just a key point. Our first, we we do appreciate the revenue. We appreciate the opportunities it provides for our property owners, but we do have a duty to protect our our neighborhoods and our other residents from um you know objectionable behavior. It does bring me to the question though of how many complaints we do get and I hope that if you know for the folks experience that kind of thing that you do complain um and I take it that in some of the cities the the um STRs on are on let's say a tighter leash than just an existing homeowner. I mean, if I if my neighbors kids are, you know, partying in the pool after the 10:00 noise or or the noise ordinance comes more into play, I complain. But if it's a recurring thing with a STR, we could have more severe penalties, could we not?

Yes. I believe in St. those piss because they have the whole college scene. They have a lot of um restrictions and fines on on parties and that sort of stuff where tenants end up having to pay substantial fines for you know out of control behavior. Yes.

Correct. Yeah. So I mean we could I mean it begs the qu uh or one speaker asked the question how many problems do we have and are we enforcing them um are we enforcing our existing noise noise ordinances but uh you know I always concerned if a neighbor says well we call nobody does anything that's that's always an issue of concern because we'd want to talk about enforcement. I want to kind of go down through some things so we address. One of the key things I'd like to address would be whether or not we want to apply any of this to multif family. I mean, my own thought again is that there's only this only is existing in two multif family structures in the city. And I just part of me would say, yeah, we should not allow it in multif family because that should be for housing. But on the other hand, I don't want to kind of get into overregulating where some people are renting out their spare room in an apartment or anything. So my own inclination would be to say we don't need to apply this regulation to multif family properties because it's just not a problem but if it became a problem we always could revisit that. So I want to see how you guys feel about that piece.

Um that for me that falls into the category of um not waiting till after the course is gone to shut the barn door. Um, I think that we should go it because since there isn't already a problem, it won't create a create an issue if we uh just go ahead and confirm the status quo and not um and not allow this except ban it except for owner occupied an owner occupied uh thing that should handle if if we have an owner occupied requirement. Can we uh does that count if the owner is somewhere on that property? So, if they're the other half of the duplex or the triplex and they're renting part of it out or renting us renting a room in the in one house, either way, that would that would work, right?

To be clear, though, when we just when we use the term owner occupied, um, you know, somebody might be a long-term renter of a property. You know, they might rent a house and if their landlord allows it, they could rent out a room, I assume. So, want to be clear about what we mean by owner occupied. When you talk about in a duplex, a lot of, you know, times owner rents out both sides of that duplex. Let's say they don't live in either one of them. So, I'm not sure where we want to go in that kind of scenario. But my concern on that would be if it I you know rent out a one half of a duplex and my half has two bedrooms and you know I'd like to rent out one of those bedrooms on a on on an Airbnb basis that has the potential of impacting my neighbors but it also has potential of substantial income for me. So but I mean go ahead and answer the council.

There's several different ways this can go. I mean I think it can be owner occupancy regulated. It could be their primary residence regulated. It could be that there's a primary resident living there long-term. So, you can specify any of those things, but we always have to keep in mind what can we actually regulate and enforce and how can we track these things. So, that always has to be on the forefront of the mind when you do establish any of these criteria. Um, primary residence probably easier for us. Owner occupancy probably pretty easy to regulate. when you start getting further from that, it becomes challenging like how do you how do you verify it? So

yeah, I think well I think if if you had and either the owner or the primary resident or someone who claims that property is a primary resident being allowed to do that um in a multif family and nobody else. I mean that seems like that would be pretty easy to tell and you know no big deal. I I do feel though like when it comes to like the single family homes there is we have had some issues I mean so I feel it's a more identifiable problem than the multif family piece but you're prevent where I hear you coming from is that you think we should apply uh said ordinance prospective ordinance to multif family

things it's not waiting to I mean we can do it now and it's not going to create a big problem

no I I think we should apply it to multif family. Now, uh I don't think we should wait for problems to arise before we address them. Um if we open the door too much for multif family units, you know, apartment buildings is my probably my biggest concern. Duplexes maybe not not that big a deal. And if the owner is living in one of the units, then you know, I'm probably less concerned about that. But if we if we allow once the door is open, it's going to be hard to undo that and and if it becomes a problem, it might not be a problem now, but that doesn't mean it's going to be in the not in the future. And I think it's wise for us to anticipate potential problems in the future and just not just make sure that we have safeguards in place to not let something like that happen that could be bad.

Okay. One thing I would want to in terms of providing guidance for staff on this piece of the issue is um we have for example La Plaza here where um you know those are technically condos. They're all owned by the by the overall property owner at this point. They are individually sellable but they had originally thought they might utilize some um you know some of them on an Airbnb type basis. I spoke with Mr. Zapus today about, you know, did you do that? Did it work out? And the answer is yes, they did do it. It wasn't particularly problematic, but it wasn't it wasn't profitable either. So, they now, you know, rent all of those units on a long-term basis. Um but the question would be and I think this goes to city manager experience in Pismo Beach where you know you looking at the downtown as a different and mixeduse buildings perhaps is a different uh scenario than just regular apartment buildings. So, that if we were going to say, if I'm hearing you say we should not allow uh short-term rentals in multif family, I would say that there should be an exception for uh mixeduse buildings, certainly in the downtown area. Uh because that's more of the kind of place where people might expect to be able to obtain that that experience.

And actually, I I would agree with that. That's something I had thought about as well is is downtown is a completely different environment. It's a different zone. Um people that and plus the mixed use aspect of it, it is different than just taking up a block of apartments or condos in a large building. So I would agree with that

and I and I do think that you know since we since I had asked you know have this on there the market has changed where you know people did experiment with that during pandemic post pandemic um and finding that it in most cases doesn't pencil out so that it's not a significant uh issue in terms of you know loss of housing availability. So, but I would suggest that they, you know, that we uh not that we kind of not include uh downtown mixed use buildings in that. So, do you have a thought?

Well, there get get it to work. Um yeah, I I can work with with uh an exclus excluding downtown from that restriction um on on multif family uses. Let mixed use in downtown um be be available. you know, we need to watch it and we'll need to make sure that we don't create a situation that has um you know, a lot of uh where we are allowing other problems to develop. But um if that's I think that we should continue to that we should go ahead and implement it in other areas at least and rather than implementing it nowhere, implementing it outside of downtown would work for me.

Okay. Thank you. Um, in terms of of uh um some don't know that I see anything else relative to the multif family piece that if you're suggesting we not we not allow it except in the downtown area.

I ask a clarification on that. Mayor the downtown thing is very clear that that these would be allowed uh in downtown. Are you talking about multifamily zones or multifamily structures once built? because we have some uh single family structures and multif family zones that really aren't different than a single family home. Under state law, you can have up to four units on a single family home with a Jedu and an ADU. Are you saying that that that's multif family then and couldn't be used from Yeah, I understand. And and you and I discussed this this morning because I mean from my perspective if it's a single it's a if it's a home on a multif family zoned lot to me it's a home. I mean, yes, it might have an ADU, it might have an attached ADU, etc. Just because it happens to be in a multif family zoned area, I don't for me is not the driving factor. For me, the driving factor is that it's a home as opposed to uh you know, a whole bunch of uh um you know, condos or town homes built into a single structure,

right? So, I want to see what the direction there's clarity from the council on it's not so much about the zone as it is if you had five or more units on a parcel that that is considered a multif family structure and couldn't be used for short-term rentals, but below that you could and also the downtown. Is that could I get clarification on that? I'd like to yeah defer starting with Yeah, my concern mostly was multif family structures. So, apartments, condos, town homes and such. Yes.

I Yeah, likewise. I think the biggest concern is multifamily structures. For the record, I just I do want to raise one thought and that's in terms of of how we are accommodating the housing needs of our community. Uh we have um a lot of of situations where you have a single family residence on a mult multifamilyzoned property. If we have those being taken up to be mini hotels instead of becoming uh developing out as um multifamily housing, we are in the long run limiting that uh stock. So it may be something we want to reconsider later um as we look at where we can accommodate the um housing that our arena numbers require. But, um, let me just ask planning, if we were to, um, allow for short-term rentals to continue in single family structures that are in multi-family zones. Do we have enough multifamily zone land to accommodate our current round of Rita numbers? That's the regional housing needs assessment that um Miss Keane mentioned earlier.

Yes. Now, Reena is going to change. I'm going to have some hopefully some preliminary numbers as soon as tomorrow. Oh. But uh for the future way out, you know, and the other factor to keep in mind is our general plan update if and once approved will expand mixed use and multif family zoning. So yes, short answer is yes. Okay. We have lots of additional inventory coming that I'm full with.

My my concern though part of your comment was is that I mean if if somebody owns a what is a single family structure in it on a piece of land it happens to be multif family or or we make it multifamily zone through the general plan update process. you know, I don't want to treat them differently than somebody, you know, like me that owns, you know, a house on three acres out farther out. Um, because I I don't want to be in the point of, oh, no, we expect you to build ADUs on your on your property uh to achieve, you know, a higher housing density. And I don't want to preclude those people from being able to rent out a room or if they do attach an ADU uh or a junior ADU because for some people that's how it's feasible, right? They're gonna attach they're gonna change a garage into a a guest bedroom and maybe rent it out periodically. You know, I don't, you know, I don't want to interfere with with people's finances in, you know, to that degree. Um, I'm looking more to protect existing neighbors from problems than I am to try to, you know, force things on somebody just because they happen to be live in a multif family zoned area. But I think the point is we can wait you know on we don't have to address that in this piece. We can to answer the city manager's question say you know you you can allow this in you know mixed use buildings downtown and in single family structures uh up to four dwelling units uh that happen to be in multif family zoned.

So mayor and mayor that just quick clarification that definition you just mentioned. So we as part of this going forward we would want to define what a multif family structure is for the purposes of this particular ordinance. I think you're kind of five or more units. We would expect you to kind of come up with some detail on that. Okay. And then the other question I had related to this before we move on from mixed use and downtown. We haven't brought up mixed use outside of downtown. Mixed use in a commercial zoning district, um, which we're going to see more of with the new general plan update, um, is essentially residential over commercial in a commercial district, right?

And how would that be treated? Would that be treated the same as an apartment building or the same as mixeduse downtown?

My inclination would be to treat it as the same as mixeduse downtown, but I'm not sure my colleagues agree with that, so I want to defer. I I think in in those situations, the number of units is is not going to be large. It's not going to be 20 or 30 units like some of the apartment buildings we have here. So, I'm less concerned about something like that in in terms of, you know, if you've got five or six units on a in a m in a mixeduse in a commercial zone, you're not going to get half of them. Well, you can't. We've got it's 40% max, I think, is what it says in the in the staff report is what we do anyway. So, it's not like it's going to be inundated with short-term rentals um just by sheer uh volume of the the units that would be available. The way I see it,

I think though like if you give the example I think of a broad project moral road, you could have substantially more than six units for example, right? Some of these densities are pretty pretty high. Yeah, it could be just like La Plaza in another location. So it could be fairly substantial in response to what you were kind of uh um it could yeah it could be a three-story building with multiple units. It depends on the site. But then again in that same district you're also going to allow for hotels and motel potentially. So

living in a commercial district comes with a different set of living sort of qualities. Living next door to a short-term rental is different than, you know, I mean, literally next door, sharing a wall is different than living in a neighborhood where there's a a hotel. I mean, that's I mean, I can have a house and a hotel be down the road. That's completely different. So, I guess with that being said, you know, we talked about, and I don't want to jump ahead too much on this, but the well, it's at the top here, establishing a citywide cap or distance buffers. And then I think in a situation like that where maybe there is a substantial number of units in a mixeduse then we would use you know we could fine-tune this to death and that's what I don't want to see happen.

Yeah. Um but you know a distance buffer that's used for that situation versus neighborhoods. So units that are more than you know you can't be next door you can't can't be have clustered whatever I I go ahead

yeah I the thing that I see in this situation when you've got like a mixeduse unit you've got a common landlord and therefore you've got a much direct more direct route to accountability um and I would encourage landlords to put some provisions in their leases you know or tenants to insist on that But but it um certainly it could be it doesn't have the same problems with um no decent enforcability that we have when you've got whole house rentals out in the community. So I um I'm I'm comfortable with treating mixeduse developments in commercial zones um in the same way that we treat mixeduse developments in the downtown commercial dome. Okay. Is that clear?

Yes.

Okay. Because I mean I agree because part of though is if I go into rent an apartment in a mixeduse building and I'm going to rent an apartment on the third floor, as long as the landlord tells me, hey, some of the units in this building are going to be or maybe short-term rentals. Well, and I've bought into that, you know, and and so I don't that's one of the reasons I don't have a I don't have a problem with that. So uh and I want to preserve that flexibility in terms of the of those particular property owners and being able to uh have have those options available. Okay. So let's talk about let's move then to um you know the big enchilada which is single family homes being used as STRs. Um I want to talk first maybe this will be an easier piece of the puzzle and as parking. Um, I I would tend to agree, you know, that there should be no street parking. You know, if you're going to use the your your home to make money, you the the whole premise is you're trying to minimize the impact on the neighbors. I don't know how hard line I want to be on that. On the other hand, I mean, like where I live, you can have an event and have, you know, I can have 30 cars on my property and it's not going to bother the cars themselves aren't going to bother the neighbors. are not anywhere even near the neighbors, you know,

and so I would see that on on, you know, larger properties, maybe they request a parking number and you, you know, look at the property and and you give them a number of cars they can house, but it would also be limited to the number of guests, which is predicated on number of bedrooms or what have you. But I would say in general terms, you know, you shouldn't be putting cars out onto the street. um you know using up parking that by all rights you know is there for your neighbors as well. I don't know how you guys feel about that.

I I would agree. Yeah, I think uh street parking should should not be allowed for those reasons, but also a lot of our streets don't really accommodate too much street parking. I don't where I live in particular that doesn't even allow it. And thankfully that's one of the things in our HOA that people actually comply with. I'm, you know, I mean, the HO the CCNR say, you know, you must park your car in your garage, so you can't park it in the driveway. Well, everybody parks in the driveway, so they that you can throw that one out, but nobody parks in the street, and if they did, it would become a problem because they're narrow streets. So, yeah, I think um saying no to street parking and just blanket covers it for every uh situation.

Yeah. Um, my inclination would be to go with that, but but I would be inclined to allow for a property owner to ask for an exemption on that if they've got a situation where it's perfectly reasonable to have, you know, extra street parking um, and they can make the case upon licensing that. Got it. This I'm assuming that we have some kind of inspection process on licensing. I'd allow that exemption, but um if it's if that is too much complexity to be that flexible.

No. And actually, that's what I was going to say. If there's an inspection process, which I believe there should be, I mean, as as Mayor Borvau mentioned earlier, that really what we're talking about is commercial property the way it's being done. And there's a lot of things with that that I think should be inspected as a commercial element, commercial facility for all kinds of safety reasons and whatnot. But in that case, like anything else, if you when you apply for your permit to do this, um, submit with it a site plan that says this is this is what my property looks like. This is what the street looks like. And if the street happens to be wide enough in front of their house, maybe to accommodate one or two or more parking spaces, they can show that and that that would be the exemption, but they would have to show that the accommodation actually exists otherwise. Um, and I think everybody just plus I think having that on record for the city and again I don't want to add too much too much work for the for staff, but if that's something is on record with the permit that a simple site plan that says this is what my property looks like and and here's the parking um accommodations. I think that that's good to have an actual note of that. So, is that clear enough that basically no street non- street parking unless unless uh they apply for justify an exception and you and you agree?

Yes. What's not clear is how we would do an exception, whether that would be something that we you know, we can iron that out later. So, we'll bring some ideas. Yeah. Let's let's circle. We're I'm assuming that you're going to circle back to to some of this and we'll tie up how to do the in you know set up the enforcement mechanisms but in principle yes there should be a way to do an exception. Okay.

Okay. So let's talk about the real I guess kind of the heart of the matter in terms of uh how much limitation we want to put on or the the ownership or or um you know full-time occument piece of it and then ultimately grandfathering because I I for one you know I don't want to pull a rug out from anybody who currently operates one of these. Um so I believe in grandfathering. It's just a question of date whether it's today or some other date uh prior to today since we began the process and kind of gave people forewarning. And could you clarify for me I think you had stated at some point in our earlier today uh talking about this that there's been what 30 applications in the last calendar year or so.

Yes, that's the approximate number since and I think it's definitely been an uptick since we've started this conversation since we've done all the outreach and that's to be expected people putting in placeholders. So you are so you are under the impression that some of those applications are based on people trying to get ahead of our Yes. of whatever we're going to do. Yes.

Okay. Just want to clarify that. But I mean I do believe in grandfathering certainly uh so we don't pull out from somebody who's you know kind of done it under existing rules in good faith. But on the other hand I do still have a you know my underlying concern about you know people running a basically a commercial lodging establishment in a neighborhood. um and that uh wanting to have some, you know, uh home ownership or home occupancy uh going around that. Um so we'd like to see what how you guys feel.

Um I'm inclined to u be generous in allowing owner occupied situations. It helps our residents manage their lives, their property, and it supports ongoing community life. Um, so I don't think and it takes away 90% of the concerns about externalities, about effects on neighbors because if the uh if the owner is living there on the property, they're the first one to notice the uh the loud drunken party of at 3 in the morning in the swimming pool and put gibbos on it. Um so so I'm so I I would distinguish that we need to have some more substantial regulations uh that apply or restrictions that apply to nonowner occupied situations,

right? But so you're saying basically you would require either owner occupancy or local ownership. Um yeah the question on local ownership now can we distinguish in our policies based on where the owner lives so that we essentially give a be benefit to anascadero resident who someone who lives in the city but doesn't live on that property. Sure. Happy to address this and I also just want to take a moment to introduce myself to those who don't know know me. Um I'm Taylor Fland. I serve as your assistant city attorney. You'll see me at planning commission meetings, but Dave, our uh city attorney, is absent today, so that's why I get to be here.

Thank you for that. I forgot to I meant to ask you that. U introduce yourself. So, thank you. Thank you.

Um and then on to the question. So, you asked whether there would be a require you could have a requirement that uh the owner of the short-term rental be a Tascadero resident. Is that correct? Can we treat properties where they are owned by an Atascadero resident who isn't living on that property differently from properties that are owned by someone who does not live in Atascadero? I think that would be run into some issues related to the dormant commerce clause kind of not a not a very well-known piece of the constitution but um pertains to disruption of interstate commerce. So you would need to be able to substantially or you need to be able to justify your reason for doing so. Um, typically what we see in these situations is um either just a blanket owner occupancy requirement or this local contact requirement, both of which address health and safety concerns. whether you could tie a uh a resident ownership whether you could tie resident ownership to a health and safety benefit I think would be um a bigger question that would require some more research.

Yeah, I think we could um end up creating some really complicated problems if we um did a did something that treats local non-resident owners. Whereas if this is somebody's primary residence, whether they own it or live in it, um that's um a pretty clear thing and that's where you get you don't need a local contact if somebody is living on the property. If you if they're not living on the property, you need a local contact, a 24-hour contact. Well, that

yeah, that begs I mean essentially that is the issue though is are you requiring owner occupancy uh or just a lo a local contact? Because if you're if you're just requiring a local contact, then you're saying, you know, um the house can be uh strictly used for short-term rentals and is not part of the housing stock. Um, but if in order to have a 24-hour contact, I mean, I don't know if any of the property management companies, I don't know if if any of them I've ever used one, if they have a 24-hour hotline for something that comes up. Um, otherwise then the owner would need to be contacted and be able to make their way to the property if needed within a certain amount of time. I think it's in the staff report as a as a recommendation or it was at least mentioned somewhere. Uh, I think I think the 24-hour contact is important and if that means that the owner must reside in in the county and not beyond, then I'm okay with that. Question that I have and this is kind of kind of related to it. Are JA are junior ADUs allowed to be used as short-term rentals?

No, they are not. They're not. So, it's the same thing as ADUs. They just can't be. Okay. That's correct.

And then I just want to add the clarification. And I think I heard you say something about requiring the owner be a county resident or a local resident of some kind in order to operate the STRs. That is where we get into some issues with justifying um that particular regulation on constitutional standards. Um whether we can justify the owner's proximity to the property as a meaningful regulation in terms of interstate commerce. Um, usually that is addressed by a local contact which is a less burdensome requirement if that makes sense. Probably don't

kind of. So I actually kind of confused me. So well I understand if you live near the county line and the owner lives 20 miles away but in a different county then that sort of kind of messes everything up. So, instead of saying that they must live in a tasker or in a county, can we can we give it a radius and say that they must live I mean they're wherever they are if they're going to be the 24-hour contact, they must be no further than whatever mile

what you usually do. Yeah. But I think the easier thing is to say you must have a contact respond by because the key enforcement to this thing is the neighbors observation, right? So if something's really happening next door and you have a guide or good neighbor, most of the people who rent these are going to be fine, right? And so it's about the couple that break violate the privilege of the rule. So I think that's why the good neighbor policies and brochures are good because when a license issued, it's easy for us to execute sending a brochure to each of the neighbors and the cost of that is paid for by the permit, you know, issuance. And so there's a number there. They can call. And when you have a complaint, a person has to respond within 30 minutes is usually reasonable. So it doesn't matter where they live, they just need to be there in 30 minutes. And the neighbor needs to know that they address the issue in 30 minutes. And if they don't, then they could file a concern or complaint. If you get too many of those, you lose your privilege of uh, you know, using the house, right? just want to distinguish between requiring that the owner of the property that operates in STR be live in the county um versus a local contact be in county. The local contact being in county um has a kind of clear justification in relationship to health and safety. Having the actual owner of the property be a county resident is where the more tenuous connection

they're trying you we're there's two policy objectives the council is trying to consider, right? One is the health and safety of a response for quality of life in the neighborhood. So that's the the person that that's for the person that responds in a half hour. The other issue is housing stock, right? So if you grandfather in people who have bought these as investments that don't live there, they have a manager. They have a person that will respond. Uh that's just an investment opportunity. If you grandfather them or you don't, that's up to the council. Then going forward after that date, are these owner occupied or not? Because that's about pro protecting housing stock, right? that doesn't have to do with um the other item. You've addressed that differently. So that's where I think staff needs to kind of hear from me on that.

Right. I mean that's the key point is either you require owner occupancy. If you don't require owner occupancy, it doesn't matter if the person lives in Montana or they live down the street because they're going to pay somebody to be the 24-hour local. They can just pay somebody 24-hour local contact. And you can't require them to live in a Tascadero. You but you can require them to live on the property. You know, that's the bottom line. So, it's either either it's owner occupied or it's just you're just paying for you're paying an extra fee for your property manager be available in the middle of the night at 2 in the morning, you know, to run over and chew out the guests for screaming in the pool. And so, u so the real issue here is do we require owner occupancy? Now, what does that mean? If you require owner occupancy, then it becomes difficult to rent out the whole house unless you know you're living in the ADU.

No. So, what owner occupancy is one of the things we we've done that worked in court

um and because we we actually had a lawsuit that this firm defended for uh down in my other city. And so, usually there if it's your primary home that you live in for six months plus a day a year. So, you can go on vacations and rent it out as long as you have the contact. but it still is a housing unit for you. It's your primary home. And when you go to pick up your permit, you show proof of homesteading on your property tax. That's easy to do. And you show one or two other documents, your voter registration, your ID. There's other things you can show. And that's that's kind of it. And then it's your word. And believe me, neighbors watch and they'll watch. They know if you live there or not. And we actually had neighbors keep track of a calendar and they actually exed how many days the person was there or not through photography. And that was upheld in court that the person was not it was not their primary residence. and they were, you know, fined thousands of dollars. So, there are ways to do it that way. Um, I think the question is, do you need to have a home stay where someone's always living there, which is more strict than an owner occupied home, which means you're there six months in a day or it's an investment property.

Yes.

And there are people who, you know, they live there, but they want to they leave a lot on weekends and they want to rent it out. I don't know, you know, I don't have a problem with that. it is their home and as long as there's they are providing an alternate point of contact when they're out of town I I can I can live with that. I mean because that's it's still a house. It's still a home for a Tascadero residents and they um but you know they have the opportunity to make make some money. But the question again boils back to so for new for new folks, you know, because we grandfather in the existing people for new folks, you know, do we say no, you you need to be the res the primary resident of the property if you're going to rent it out as an SDR? That's really the key question of this entire exercise. And so that's kind of what, you know, I think we need to weigh in on for staff.

Yeah. And when we discussed this before, there was a lot of concern out in the community that we were um nipping something in the bud that would be useful to the community. And we've had people ask for some opportunity to continue doing this. Um I think if we if we allow for some of that, we do need to have um restrictions on the number and proximity of those. a limited number. We could consider allowing a limited number of licenses and allow them within a certain proximity. Um we have to have good the good solid policies about our neighbor communications and all of that because it does create more risks when the whole home is being rented out.

So you're saying we should allow we'd need to go down that road if we allowed nonowner occupied. Yeah. If we go down non non-owner occupied, then we need to have some um strict uh limits on how many because that it is eating away at our housing stock. It has the potential to change the quality of life in the character of communities if you have very much of this. I I kind of learned, you know, that,

you know, the market has changed. There's probably not as much demand for this as there was when we first talked about it. But I have wanted I have wanted to avoid what I've seen these other cities go through, you know, these painful machinations of how many and how far apart and all this kind of stuff. And that's why for me the simpler answer was to say no, you know, it needs to be owner occupied, needs to be your home. You you can leave for the weekend, that's fine, but it needs to be your home. and that that's and that way it's it's still a home for a Tascadero residents, but they're allowed, you know, they can make money on it by renting out a room or the entire house if they choose to do so. I've kind of wanted I'd like to have minimal regulation as much as possible. So, I kind of wanted to stay away from the how many and the how distance um sort of a situation um

although I have anyway. Yeah. Although I a strict odor occupancy requirement is it is is a less complex but much stricter regulation in the sense it does not allow any any of that. I do agree I understand that that some residents want and some residents do not. I understand Portender has comment on that. This is a complicated one. This is the issue.

Yeah. Uh well the the way you describe the owner occupancy and the way city manager did as well. I mean, I I I I can see how that Well, basically what that does is it's not going to be an Airbnb, you know, all year long. It's just um occasionally and uh at least less than half the year anyway. So, I I think with that being said, I think the owner occupancy is is a good method is a good way to go about it. Okay.

Yeah. So, if if the other two of you want to go with an own donor occupancy requirement, um then I'm I'm comfortable with doing that for now. We uh knowing that we can revisit that and opening it up later if we decide that that um that adding additional units beyond whatever we're grandfathering in um is uh uh is something that we would like to do and make available as an investment opportunity for folks. Yeah. So just for clarification then so what this is saying then is somebody can't own a house live somewhere else and then have that house be strictly used as

an S str that's what we're okay because I want to make sure I understand that because because if that's still going to be allowed where the single family residence can be used any time during the year then there needs to be a distance between the next one. No, that I mean if we say it has to be owner occupied then essentially they either you know they've got to own it, they've got to live there most of the time. Okay. You know they would be able to rent it out on you know whenever they'd be able to rent it out when they're not there, right?

They'd still have to comply then if they're not I mean if they go out of town for the weekend they'd still have to comply with the points of con, you know, 24-hour point of contact. But it would be to say no, you can't take a house and turn it into a hotel, right? you know. Okay. And that I'm I'm good with that. Yeah. Okay. So, exactly.

Yeah, I'm good with that. I do think that we should allow um as I was asking earlier that staff thought we could do allow a way for an exception to that in situations where um say you know if the primary resident's going to be away because they're often you know in a rehab facility or someplace else or you have an estate situation. I mean I understand this is a with seniors this is really this is a right but I mean these things can getical or whatever and I think staff can come up with some things that say you know there there may be exceptions to this rule. Yeah. So to allow

allow where it's functioning as a in spirit this is a primary residence even if it does not meeting the technical requirements because of some situation employed overseas for a year. Yeah. Yes. If I can still clarify too, what we're talking about here is the definition of primary residence, not owner occupied. There's two different things. They're kind of synonymous, but really primary residence means that that person could be gone for four months, right?

And but it's their primary residence on the tax roles. And also, so somebody could have a property that has a a large house, you know, or a larger house, 2500, 3,000 feet, whatever, and an ADU on the property, and the owners live in the ADU, but can rent the house. So that so in that case, that's owner occupied. Is that still under does that still fall in that definition? Well, if you wanted to. So it could be two different definition or it could be one definition has different clarifications. for example, owner resides on the property or it's within the owner's primary residence

because in because in that situation, if they live if if the owners live in the ADU and they're renting the big house out, then that large single family residence can be then rented year round as a short-term rental because they live on the property in the ADU technically. I mean, even even if they're even if they're off six months out of the year or four months out of the year somewhere else. So, if that's what you wanted to do, that would address both your policy objectives because the two things you're trying to do is on a parcel, you're trying to maintain that as a residential parcel, right? So, if someone lives in the ADU or the big house, they still live on the parcel. So, that's addressing that. The second part is

when the person comes home from their four-month trip to Europe, their neighbors will contact them if they didn't have good renters. You know, that there's a peer pressure there, which is part of the citizen enforcement of this thing that protects your neighborhoods. And and to be clear that you could do that if the ADU was built after before 2020 because under state law you can't turn the ADU into an STR if it was built after 20. Yeah. But not the ADU but they can live in the ADU and rent the rent the main house out. Right. Okay. Yeah. At any time the ADU but I mean

true but in terms of living in the main house renting out the ADU it would have to be built after 2020. Correct. Right. Okay. And that would give the owner of that property, you know, the the flexibility to rent it out even if if so that if they don't want to deal with the uh it challenges of evicting a potentially evicting a long-term tenant or dealing with that, they would be able to, you know, they live on the property, they're, you know, they're invested in the community, then this takes care of those problems. We just still, any way you slice it, we have to have require 24-hour local contact. the owner is not going to be tied to that property even if it's their primary residence or even if that's where they live all the time. They still may be off visiting their grandchildren.

But if it's their primary residence, they're going to be a lot more responsive to the neighbors on an ongoing basis. Oh, yeah. There is some long-term accountability there. Um most of us in the community deeply care about what our neighbors, you know, think about and maintaining good relationships with our neighbor.

That's the key aspect here. We need to give staff a little more guidance and then we can can close this out. But um in terms of do we want to require uh an in you know there's going to be an application process for this. Do we want to require an inspection? I was uh interested to note that apparently Pastor Robels does not require expens an inspection. I don't my myself don't want to establish a minimum that's up to the you know to the property owner. Somebody might want to only rent out their property during Calpali graduation when they can do it for a lot of money or Calpali open house or just a few key events. But of course, if we have a substantial fee, that's going to push people towards renting it out more often, right? Because if they're going to have a fee that's like 800 bucks, they're like, "Whoa, I'm going to have to, you know, rent this out certain minimum number of nights to make it worthwhile." I initially thought, well, inspection makes sense, but if it's I I don't want to impose personally a a substantial fee on folks to do this. I want it to be as minimal as possible. My question would be to my colleagues is do we really need to do an inspection? We don't now. And if other city if some other cities don't require it, what's our um is this again, you know, a solution in search of a problem? I understand the theoretical problem if somebody's running out on unsafe residents, but but if it's if Paso doesn't, you know, require that and they have a lot more of these a lot more active ones, do we really need that? So,

well, my my feeling on that is, you know, when you build a hotel as a business there, it has to comply with certain codes and regulations and in order for it to function as a hotel. So, it's it's a commercial business. So, I think it might be a simple inspection, but I think it needs to be inspected to make sure that safety standards that that it is safe. I mean, if you know, maybe there's an old furnace in the in the house that's, you know, got issues and it's just not a the structure, the building, there's something about it that's not safe. It just needs to be inspected. I think if you're going to operate this as a business, it needs to be treated as a business as in any anything else. So, I think inspections are important. the initial uh the initial application it needs to be inspected and then I don't know if it's maybe every once a year every other year whatever it is but I think like any other business it needs to be made sure that it's up to par with codes and safety standards.

Okay. Thank you. Um my inclination would be to require that for properties that are principal residence but not owner occupied. So if the owner's living there on the property, I don't then um it's already they already consider it safe enough for them. Not necessarily. I mean people can live in some pretty pretty squalor situ uh condition. Well, they're not going to be able to rent their place out on air, you know, on Airbnb if they're still yeah. Everybody is as responsible as the three of us sitting up here. So I think I think inspections are important. I think if it's going to be a business, it needs to be inspected, right? I guess saying if if it's a dump, they're not going to last very long in this business, right? They're not gonna they're gonna get on one star ratings and they're gonna be

Well, if we do do an inspection, I want it to include um elements of, you know, not having uh fire pits and and wood burning things out there in in high fire risk areas. Well, that's I don't know. That's something I think I potentially disagree on. Only I mean, I totally understand the risk, but that's why people rent some of these things, you know, for pools and fire pits, etc. And and I think you'd have to go more on the side of the good neighbor, the you know what you need to know about, you know, renting a house in a Tascadero, you know, um and or maybe they got to sign some before they rent it or something, you know,

in terms of the the safety stuff. So when we when you pull a permit to do just about anything, one of the one of the comments that comes back on the drawings is to make sure that you have a smoke alarm all the sleeping rooms and outside the sleeping rooms and it's CO2 detectors and all that kind of stuff. Not every house in the Tascadero has that. And if and again, if it's going to be a rented space, then those things need to be in there. So the initial inspection, you know, the inspector would go in and say, "Well, you don't have any smoke alarms in here." Okay, now you got to add them. There's your inspection. I mean, I think it's I think it's really simple to make sure that the some of the simple things just make sure that they're in there. It might be a very simple inspection, but I think it's very important. I would I mean, I can live with that, although I would I'm guessing I don't know, maybe you do, Mr. Dunmore, about whether or not some of these platforms require their own inspection or, you know, people certify that they do have those things, you know, carbon monoxide detectors because they're concerned about liability as well. I assume

from what I understand there's self-certification through these online platforms and there's nobody that comes out. I I mean I can live with the inspection requirement but I want to keep the cost minimal. I don't I think it needs to be an initial inspection and after that I I don't think we need to require certainly not annual but I mean because we want to try to minimize this fee that okay, you know, you you paid for this upfront, you paid for an initial inspection, now you're good to go. You're just going to do a low-key annual renewal fee. um and you you know and you move on from there. But I I don't see reinspecting you know these properties that frequently. We don't have that kind of inspection program for apartments or other things like that. Right.

May I suggest I think where this has worked well if the question is inspection or not inspection and if you do have an inspection it's for life safety issues. Do they have a fire extinguisher? Do their smoke detectors work? Is there a secondary exit from the house? It's not barricaded with an oven or something. and uh and that it's and usually you check for the number of rooms and the occupancy of the structure and then the on-site parking spaces. So those are the things that are usually looked at for these and you do it once and and it's a complaint based system. So if the person receives a violation or complaint then they're subject to inspection again. If they operate well and have no complaints and they're not inspected again

and egress egress out of the bedrooms is you know I mean that's a code. You can't build a house unless you have egress out of the room. So, you can't, you know, the windows might be adequate for code, but what's right outside that window? You can't jump out the window and, I don't know, fall into a rose bush or something. I'm sure that's that's that's not going to be a safe way to exit a house if needed. So, again, I'm going to say it again, inspection is important because this it's a safety thing. So, you have an initial inspection for life and safety issues. But while you're doing it, you're going to determine that, you know, the add the number of parking spaces that could be allowed. Um, you know, the number of guests that the maximum number of guests permitted, whatever. You might as well address that if you're going to be there visiting the property, I guess. Um, but I do would want it, yeah, the inspection beet one time initial and then and you guys can flesh out some of the things because we're going to have a whole another bite. We'll be here till midnight if we get into too much detail on all these. Um, so, um, I I do think you we want to address noise in terms of do we want higher standards of enforcement for this than just regular homeowners? And you also need to address the pen penalty piece of this for for failure to comply. It needs to be much more substantial than a regular $100, you know, code enforcement violation um, sort of thing. I think you guys agree with that. We'll let staff flesh that out. Yes, it needs to be a substantial thing. I think we that the requirements um are are more sign are can be more significant for this in terms of of stricter noise requirements because it is a privilege to use your property in this way and it does impose some challenges on the neighbors to have that house um occupied by people who are always going to be on vacation.

Yeah. And I think we can agree that there should be notice to neighbors and there should be a good neighbor brochure. Yes, that sort of thing. And we will hire we the city will have a third party consultant to help us pursue compliance with this. Think that's good. So the the key I think the remaining key thing that we need to address is u we I guess we don't have to specify because we could address it when it comes back as an ordinance but we need to give thought to how far back we want to grandfather. to be grandfather anybody who's got a you know permitted as of today uh or some other time or do we just we just want to address that when they when you bring back an ordinance staff can bring uh can address that when we bring that back and we can come back with a couple different options

I think though we're forewarning people that it could be as of today or or even as of when the draft ordinance was introduced and and for count from legal counsel we can do that the grandfathering retroactive to a retroactive date where we're going to say you don't have to have owner occupancy if you already have an existing permit. You sorry, could you say that one more time? Well, so if we're if going forward we're saying um bring back an ordinance that includes like an owner occupancy requirement or you know a primary residence requirement.

Um but we're we're not going to apply that to people with current permits. you know, people are grandfathered in if they had a permit in place as of, you know, today, as of August 19th, 2025 or as of October, you know, 2024 when we first discussed this. We can we can do grandfathering, but can we pick a retroactive date to which we say you must have had a permit in place prior to this date?

Yes, you could choose a date. You would, if you're choosing a date in the past, you would want to allow some time to come into compliance. For those that do not current, if I'm understanding you correctly, for those that are, say you chose um I don't know, January 1st of 2025, just to make it easy, you would want as your cut off, if you had a permit before that time, those that got permits between January 1 and whenever this ordinance comes forward, you would likely want to have kind of an amortization period to allow them to come into compliance.

All right. because myself I I mean I could live with today kind of forewarning people that when the ordinance comes back it's going to have this requirement so you know so we don't have 100 people coming in in the next week trying to you could do that you could also do say uh you choose today and those that get their permits uh in between now and and whenever this comes back to you um the next year of permitting they are required to they could uh fill out the rest of their year of their permit if it's a year-long permit. And then they would have to get come into compliance and get a permit in accordance with the new regulations the following year

for those. Okay. But I mean if if you've been running one of these since, you know, 2019, we're not applying this requirement to you. And that's something you could do. Yes. Period. I mean, we're not, you know, we're not going to pull the rug out from an existing operator.

Yeah. I mean, typically the cleanest way to do it would be that any permits obtained prior to the effective date of the ordinance are grandfathered. But if you wanted a period of time uh in between then that you want those permits to get into compliance, then you would typically have an amount of time that lets them okay come into compliance. I I think we can wait till you bring back the ordinance, but kind of fair warn people that it it could be, you know, not the date of the ordinance. It could be earlier than the date of the ordinance.

Right. I think the thing to be clear is that if we're in consensus on this, if we're applying an owner occupancy requirement for future uh permits, that um it has to be owner occupied or primary residence as of today. Don't go out there and buy a new place and think you're going to be able to shove it in under the door. Um, so that's that warns people not to make an invest in investment if they're counting on using it in a way that will not be um allowed in the future based on the best available projection that we have now so that we're fair to people.

I can I can live with that view. Okay. All right. Does that clear guidance then? Okay. All right. I think we are done unless there's what else fire safety. I had one quick question that's on this page. I was going to ask it earlier. Why use a third party consultant to collect toot? What's what's the purpose of that and and what does it cost the city? I mean, what is to do that? Let me defer that to the finance director. She can probably more eloquently answer that question. Thank you, Jerry. Hopefully, I'll help you.

Um, a number of of benefits to that. So, it provides an online reporting. So people can report from home online, pay with credit card, pay with a check, either that makes them comfortable. Certainly, they're still welcome to mail it in or bring it into city hall. We welcome payment anyway we can get it. Um but it does offer a convenience for them that they have they had asked for prior to getting that and it sta saves a lot of staff time um for city staff. Okay. So, it's easier for the the homeowner and it's easier for staff. Correct. Best answer ever. All right. Thank you, Ryan. Expert.

Two things. One's easy and that's I would like the staff to come back to us with an option for uh having the um in in principle the costs of third-party monitoring for non-compliance with uh licensing to be paid for by those who are non-compliant with their licensing. Um, in addition, we would likely do that. We don't have, as you know, a lot of staff sitting around here to do inspections and enforcement and licensing and this is all going to be largely consultant supported. Uh, and that cost will need to be borne through the permit. I hear the cost sensitivity of the council, but if there's regulations and desires, that's expensive. I mean, and so we'll show you that cost and which each component costs,

right? If you still want that your ordinance,

right? So my point is the most of these regulations will be borne by the people who are going to profit from using their properties as short-term rentals um and share that with the city um through the toot. I want to see about the cost of monitoring the the SB346 monitoring or whatever. Um that is watching the uh listings for properties that are not properly licensed and aren't paying their toot but are selling, you know, out as as um short-term rentals that those are the folks that ought to be paying the cost of that program. Um, and ju just like we do for weed abatement, think about coming back with some kind of structure like that. I at least want to see that proposal come back to us. It may or may not prove workable, but that's what I'd like to see.

I don't have a problem in, you know, asking you to address that. The problem, of course, is, you know, if you have a certain amount of cost, if you're if you're dependent then on having a certain number of violators to pay for it. I It's kind of like weed abatement. We hope there's no violators, in which case we have to suck up the cost of Chief Wson's time to go out and look at all the properties and all that. You know what I mean? So, yeah, we we want, you know, the violators to pay, but they may or may not pay the whole cost of the program if there's not enough violators. So, we don't, you know, it kind of is a cross purposes in a sense. But yes, I think I would like staff to address how we try to uh see to it that is that the violators pay for the cost of administrative program.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. You have one

and the other the other issue is is the fire safety which I have raised repeatedly um from the we've heard uh from folks here tonight. Um I don't think it I come out of the healthcare environment in in hospital administration there are certain things that are called never events. It's, you know, you shouldn't go to the hospital and have them for an amputation, have them cut off the wrong leg. Okay? Uh, never should happen. It does occasionally. You don't have to have data that it happens frequently at your hospital to know that you have to design your system so it never happens. Okay? And the risk that the predictable increase in the risk that somebody who is not as uh aware of this community, who is going to be on vacation definitely definitionally um you know and who may be several drinks into that vacation. um that this person is going to be more likely to do um something stupid that would ignite a fire that could could travel elsewhere and damage other properties. Um and you know the never event is somebody comes in here and is having a great party and burns down the community. Okay, never. You know, we don't want that ever to happen. We need to address the fact that we are allowing um some increase in risk uh by having people doing short-term rentals. uh we've addressed some of it because of the owner occupancy requirement or the owner occupancy or primary residence requirement, but I do think still think it is wise for us to look at what communities um with lots of fire risk also do. That includes places like Plaster County um where they don't allow fire pits and

those kinds of things or um or Santa Rosa area Sonoma. So we don't have to understand I I don't mind staff taking a look at that. But the thing is, I mean, part of that needs to be does anybody else do that because I I'm concerned about how you implement that because you're not I mean, stupid people are going to do stupid things and you can write all the rules you want and if like saying, "Oh, you can't have, you know, a fire pit at an STR." Well, somebody's going to do it anyway. And you're not I mean, unless unless you want the neighbors peeking over the fence and calling it in, you know, which they could. um just like I just don't know how

viable that is in terms of workability and I don't know if staff has a comment or just want to think about that when you bring back an ordinance check with other cities see if there's anybody has a viable way of doing that

if I can yeah comment on that again this I think this goes back to the safety inspection so let's talk about the scenario of a fire pit that's already existing in a house been there for 20 years or more okay Where is it located? Is it right underneath the big oak tree that grew and now it's now it's just a tinder box waiting to go off? Okay, so maybe that fire pit shouldn't be there in the first place. I don't, you know, it's so it's stuff like that. That's the safety inspection. If you see something like that, it's like, well, that's to me would be a normal thing that the fire chief Oakley would, you know, if he saw that, you know, that that fire pit probably shouldn't be there. That's just a, you know, a a big giant fire just waiting to happen, even by a regular homeowner. So, I I agree with you in that sense, but you you're not going to go around and inspect every single house in the task for stuff like that. I've got a big sycamore tree in my backyard, and I'm afraid to have a fire pit because that thing will probably go up in a heartbeat if I if embers went up into it. Um, but in this situation, again, we're treating this as as a business, as a commercial sort of aspect. So I think among the safety inspection items that they would look at, they would look and see is it safe to have a fire pit in any particular backyard and let's let's not wait for the fire to happen before we go. Okay, we should probably start regulating that. So I agree with that. On the other hand, you're not going to stop somebody who isn't thinking well straight clearly from, you know, lighting their barbecue with a rolled up newspaper and having it, you know, go off into the weeds, you know, because you may go, "Oh, the fire pit's in a great place. That's perfectly okay. Somebody's can still do something stupid." But I just I just saying, "Yes, go ahead and address it." But I would like you to address whether or not other you see that in any other city's ordinances, right? Is it is it um if you know is it a practical thing to try to do? I understand the need or the desire certainly. So is that good? I mean

yeah that'll work. And I think the uh the places I've seen be sure you look at the high fire risk communities. Not just we have more fire risk here in Tascadero than most of our neighbors. So our county is not a good model for that. But uh places like Santa Rosa and Placer County up in Lake Tahoe area, some of those areas where fire risk is a significant concern um would be maybe useful u models for us. I'm sure there are probably um some others and and and yeah, it should be in both. You know, you set some rules. there will be people who violate them anyway, but we just did that with the fireworks ordinance. We know that there will be some people who will say, you know, make rude rude hand gestures and do things anyway. And there's an opportunity for neighbors to notice that, to call it in, and to um bring useful enforcement to stop behavior that is dangerous.

Okay. So, staff, is that all good enough guidance for you to move forward? Plenty of guidance. I I think I'd like to just touch on one sort of process component though and I'm just want to understand if council expect us expects us to bring back a sort of draft framework before going back to planning commission and then back to council for final ordinance or do you feel like you have a good enough handle on this where we go through the planning commission to make a recommendation and so it sounds like we want to bring some framework back what I'm hearing from the city manager at this point I'm and because there's still some nuances to iron out. Yeah. I'm going to defer to to you your guys, the city manager judgement.

Yeah, we not we're not taking this to the planning commission. You need you may have a council member requalified so this will come back. Exactly. And if we have a you know I very much would like the other council members to be able to participate. Um and so yeah, I think coming back here first makes sense. And timing wise, our big priority is general plan and zoning code. So this may not come back till mid end of summer. Understand, bro. I mean, I figured it would be at least four months, let's say. Thank you. Yeah, I understand.

Yeah, that's why I wanted to be very clear about the grandfathering issue because um I don't want people to rush out and buy up properties in this community and ri and you know, gobble up the housing stock um in the anticipation that they can get in under the wire and uh do a commercial business in that residential uh zone.

Right. Okay. All right. With that, we are concluded on this item and uh other council members can rejoin us. We're going to take a break uh to so they have an opportunity to come up and also just we've been up here a long time. So, let's take a break. It's 8:41. Let's uh reconvene at 8:50. All right, folks. It's 8:50. We said we would reconvene then. Actually, it's 8:49. I'm getting ahead of myself. So, Oh, now it's 8:50. Everybody taking their seats? Like to start on time. Um okay we are going to proceed to our next item which is a discussion of um I know it's about slow co the slowcog halfsent sales tax expenditure plan um so we're going to turn it over to either Mr. Dybar or Mr. for Ryan Betts to present and I see we have representatives of Slowcog here in the audience. I don't know if they're going to present or just available to answer questions and I thank them for sitting through our long discussion of the prior item.

Thank you mayor and city council Ryan Bett's public works analyst and I will hit the highlights knowing um we had a long meet uh item before us and we do have members of um Slowcog with us. I uh Annie Thowski who was here back in January will also present some of the items tonight. Let me back up. To be clear though, we have seen the expenditure plan before. So I'd like you to highlight any changes from what we heard in the prior meeting.

Absolutely. That's our strategy tonight. So the item before you is the St. Louisville Council Government's final transportation expenditure plan for a potential transportation sales tax measure. The emphasis is on final. uh January 13th, this uh draft expenditure plan was presented and our city council went through that with a fine-tuned comb and provided valuable input and I can honestly attest uh as I talked to my colleagues in other cities and the county uh this council took that very serious and provided a lot of input and I'm happy to share that that input made it into the final. Just a quick quick overview. The Sale Bispal Council of Governments, otherwise known locally as Slowco Cog, is our regional agency that focuses on allocated federal and state uh funds for transportation purposes on a regional and local level. Um they also provide public transit services on highways and roadway improvements. And finally, they prepare the regional housing needs allocation and a sustainability community strategy. By and large, they are a agency that looks out for the regional approach for the S county. Uh representatives of each of the city uh council's share on that slow board, including council member Nuome. Uh this item has really uh gained some speed since last summer. I want to be clear tonight. This is reviewing the final transportation expenditure plan. It is not um putting a any type of potential sales tax measure on the ballot. Um it's focusing really on should that become a reality uh and should it be approved by the voters, the transportation expenditure plan will be the guiding document on how those funds are spent.

as proposed. It's a half cent countywide transportation ballot that's again potentially proposed for the November 2026 election. As I reiterated in January, council provided really helpful and insightful input on that expenditure plan. All that input and together with the other six cities, the county and several or many of the the community service districts all came together and Slowcog put that plan together as part of the final transportation uh expenditure plan that was approved at the Slowcog board level on February 4th. And now we're at this point where Slowcog will now present that final transportation expenditure plan back to the cities. and we'll go over next steps and ultimately to the county and the board um on April 1st. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Annie Bowski with Slowcog. And good evening, council. Thank you so much for having us back. And I promise I will go through this rather quickly, but I'm happy to answer any questions at the end. Um, just starting off, thank you so much Ryan for the great introduction and just sharing this slide. I know many of you have seen this before, but basically this is the reason we're all here today. So, at this point, 89% of Californians in 25 counties have approved a voter uh or voter approved transportation tax, which means they're collecting a portion of funds and putting that toward road improvements and safety improvements throughout the county. And just a quick look at our neighbors, um Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Santa Barbara. since um a couple of these um locations put their transportation tax in in 2016 and uh

Santa Barbara actually did it in 2008. But since 2016, they literally collected hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's not just the money collected um at the county level. It's additionally the funds that can be leveraged back um from the state and federal government. So, Slow County has collected uh none of these funds, which is why uh we continue to be left behind. We went out for a transportation tax back in 2016, but uh lost by about 400 votes and um have also lost out on quite a bit of funding since that did not pass. And once again, this is the reason why we're all here today uh looking for a ballot um to place a measure on the November 2026 ballot. And this is just a breakdown. Um, as Ryan mentioned, the uh board approved the Silk board approved the uh expenditure plan at the February 4th meeting. And you guys saw this last time, but just to reiterate, a half cent for every dollar sales tax would generate about $35 million per year throughout the county. And we've broken that down into four different elements. Um a uh 55% uh uh would be for road and safety improvements and this portion of the funding would be broken down into the eight jurisdictions and basically that would add up to about $2 million per year for a task and then additionally there is a 40% uh for regional corridor improvements which would bring um almost $5 million a year to the uh north county region along with um a portion for uh mobility improvements and then an administrative fee. And basically when we were here last time um the council was uh very generous with their time and very generous with their feedback and we definitely heard you guys and made some improvements

based on that. Um, starting off, this was actually just more of a general FYI, but um, one of the decisions that, uh, or the edits that was made on, um, the final draft was that the board of supervisors decided to break their portion, which is $8.4 million um, of funding, break it down based on population of the five supervisorial districts. So that this in no way affects cities but um it's just one of the major changes that um people um were discussing as something that is different from the original plan and um of course last time as well um does have their own measure uh their own uh general fund transportation measure and it was asked if the citizens oversight committee for Tascadero could actually take the place of the citizens oversight committee. That would be for this new proposed slowco measure. And just an FYI that it is best practice to have um a separate uh citizens committee to oversee this information and it also uh gives the unincorporated area a voice. So just a follow up on that uh comment from last time. And additionally in section five is the measure of effort clause. And basically what this does is it ensures jurisdictions would only be tracked um on a baseline state sales tax that comes back to cities and it isn't uh the general fund or any other revenue sources. And this also changed from a uh three-year average to a 5-year average. Um these are just some quick uh kind of language and timing updates that we made

based on other jurisdictional feedback. And the um let's see item I in section six. This was um definitely some followup after the last meeting as well. And from the January 13th meeting um it was noted that there would be a presentation twice a year to council. So we actually changed this to twice per programming year. So basically average out averages out to once per year just to uh increase the efficiency on reporting a bit more as requested by council at the January 13th meeting. And then this uh again was uh feedback from the January 13th meeting. A request from council was to trim down the reporting uh to increase efficiency. So Slowcog looked into removing this element but after discussion with the SlowCog board it was decided to reduce the reporting time from every 3 years to every 5 years. So took down uh the need to report um a little bit on this one. And as mentioned last time, we want to show we are delivering on what was promised while making reporting uh streamlined similar to SB1 and also similar to how cities report on their uh general fund measures. Additionally, this is just kind of what's next if a measure were to pass. So the expenditure plan is a kind of the framework for what would then become the um implementation guidelines. And basically what these would do would dive down a bit more into kind of the official reporting processes and everything that would go into uh tracking the funds of how a measure would be spent. Um nothing would change from the expenditure plan. would just be a bit of a deeper dive and slow would

facilitate facilitate this process along with um feedback from all jurisdictions and of course we are here today to ask for approval on the final expenditure plan. uh we'll then take that back to the so-called board at the April 1st meeting and that would be um at that time they would uh consider adoption of an ordinance with um measure materials and request for a ballot which would be November 3rd 2026. Um just a quick look once again at what this measure would do for a Tascadero in North County. Approximately bring in a little over $2 million a year strictly to a Tascadero. That would be funds that would be decided on by the city as long as it was transportation related. And then um bring in an additional almost $5 million a year for uh regional corridor improvements within the north county. Uh greater ability to leverage grants at the federal and state level. And then additional uh improvements um for mobility for seniors, people with disabilities and veterans. And um happy to answer any questions and um dive a little deeper if you guys have any additional thoughts as well. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Anything else from staff, our staff? Okay. Um I have a question and I'll turn over my colleagues. A procedural question. Could you go back to the slide that reflected the dates that says, you know, other that one right there? Um, so we're here, you know, in the yellow highlighted um and in the different cities are doing it tonight or next week or whatever whenever they meet. Um, and it says the county consider approval of the plan. Um, then you know on here it says Slowco board April 1 do it and then it jumps to election. In our staff report, it says um it it mentions the April 1 thing, but then it says TBD to be determined 2026 board of supervisors consider placement of a transportation sales tax measure on the ballot. What I'm trying to understand because I've heard different things about this uh in this yellow highlighted bullet where cities and county consider approval of the plan. So, the county has to look and approve the plan just like us as a city, which I assume they can do on a 3-2 vote, but um in our staff report, it mentions to be determined board of supervisors essentially considering placement of it on the ballot. So, after the slow board approves, it's got to go back to the supervisors, I think, and that's missing from this slide. And I I've heard from different people who seem like they should know that that could require a four fifths vote by the board of supervisors to actually place it on the ballot. So is that correct? And is and that TBD would be after April 1st then after the SLOC board gives final approval.

Yes. Then we would then um draft a letter to the board of supervisors and at that point they would have to vote on it and just would it be a five or It would be Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It would be a 35 um vote by the board of supervisors majority vote to put it on the ballot. Yes. Okay. Interesting. That's that's good to know about the process then. And so that would be sometime April a after April 1st. Yes. Gotcha. We would um draft the letter and um send it to the board of supervisors and then that would be on their agenda for approval.

Okay. That was my question. Thank you. I'll start on my left with council member Beacon and you know we'll have a chance of course comment on this so we did hear it so just questions at this time if you would

it's been so long since I spoke and I see if I can excuse me um special projects um when I think of like raising taxes which is what we're doing we're proposing to raise taxes city funds are $2 million a year projected $2 million a year and then the other for the corridor. At what point does the city get to decide what the corridor project is? And that one committee member, how much power do they have? Uh generally committee members are people that raise their hand go to be involved and then they're pretty biased. It's one person. Uh you don't have two people. You don't have you don't have a both. It's not a balanced approach in my opinion when you have one person from one city who's not an elected official kind of serving as an oversight. How much of the oversight committee is formal or informal and how much do they really have say and no task we're not doing that we're going to do this. the rest of us in the committee decided. Um, and then also city funds, the ones that are the $2 million per year, I've heard people throw away throw around, well, that could be used for bridges, widening Santa Rosa, 17 million. I don't know. Santa, I was I was told like $17 million. So, we going to are we going to save money for nine years and then inflation maybe 11 and then widen the bridge? I'm just thinking consequential changes to town. uh we'd have to save for a few years, maybe apply for a grant. Uh nothing's guaranteed state or federally. So, I'm just curious how much we actually get to say how much that where that money is spent. And if we want to do road improvements year after year after year, is there going to be, well, sorry, this year you're going to have to

do bike lanes because that's what's popular right now and that's what we all want to do uh in the committee or in the board or what have you. So, is there and changing the the composition of our council might change the wants and needs of the city. So, is there a cycle for what we can use the money for where it has to go from category to category or can we say every single year we want to repave this part of El Camino, next year we want to repave this part of El Camino and so forth and so on. Definitely. Thank you so much. Are you referring to the regional money both? Okay. Because I mean the the two million that comes straight to us is ours to determine, but completely ours to determine.

Well, defer to Yes, I believe so. Definitely. So, um yeah, um answering kind of your first question, the $2 million is strictly for a taskadero and you guys can decide exactly how you want to spend that funding. As far as the regional projects go, um the citizens oversight committee would definitely be involved and would be able to make recommendations to the board of directors, but it would be the slow board of directors who of course you have um council member Newsome currently on the board along with Supervisor Moreno as well. And that of course that funding can be applied for um larger grants at the state and federal level. And you can also um team up with other um cities within the region if you'd like as well to kind of build funds to apply for a grant. So basically there would be potential recommendations from the uh citizens oversight committee but it would be the board of directors making the final decision on how to spend the funding for the uh 40% for regional corridor projects. So if you were looking at a larger project it would definitely take a little bit of time to save up money but then there's also the grant opportunities as well to leverage more funding. So that's kind of the trade-off of the two. So I see the biggest need in our north county region being anything having to do with 101. So and we see in the 15 years I've lived here, the 101 has been worked on on and off, repaved, dug up, repaved, you know, things have been improved on the 101 over the years. So beyond um Templeton to Atascadero bike lane beyond regional trans transportation beyond I mean what is what is CALR not doing that they would do with this money. So, one thing we were kind of we were advised against is um not to

specifically discuss projects, but um I think definitely um city staff might be able to name some projects that could be focused in um the Atascadero area with nine different intersections. I think there's definitely improvements that could be made with this funding. Um, additionally, there are um we've obviously heard of larger regional projects as well um that um this funding could go toward that's um very uh economic focused as well.

Yeah. And I I think I'll clarify some um some responses. Um council member Peak to answer your question about the the kind of the regional citizen advisory body um of which there would have to be a member from a test on that. Their purview is primarily looking in the rear view to ensure that the expenditures were spent accordingly on transportation purposes. when I read their purview and talking to staff, it's primarily similar to what we have with our sea stock committee where they're they're not as much an advisory body to the council. They're making sure to the taxpayers that that money was spent exactly for transportation purposes in the jurisdictions that they said they were going to do that. So that's we asked that from the beginning how that's going to kind of work. So I hope that helps answer that question. The second thing is the council certainly on the local level will have as much purview to how that money is spent on the transportation level. So if council wants to repave El Camino one year and do Santa Rosa another year, the council will have that absolute perview on that local level. When it comes to the regional um projects, I foresee this as utilizing already the existing slowcog kind of process for identifying regional transportation plans. In fact, they're going through that right now to update that. That's updated every threeish, five, four years. And that is an opportunity where our staff sit on their advisory bodies and work with um our staff to present our regional transportation plans um based upon long-term projects. Those projects then go into the regional transportation plan. And I could foresee the north county and the slow board using that as a guiding principle on where those those regional projects go. So there will be opportunities for Paso, Templeton and a Tesco to include their regional projects mainly on 101 certainly, but there could

be others into those significant plans. And it'll be up to the slow cog board to determine where that funding is going. And that'll be happening for South County, Central County, and North Coast as well. So, I hope that answers some of your questions.

It it does. I mean, it it it answers it enough to where like we don't know. It's kind of like the vague answer. I mean, we don't know what the money is going to be spent on down the road, but we're going to collect it. Um, and I think that just uh finally my last question is, you know, since we we still have half a cent left on our city's threshold, if we wanted to raise taxes ourselves, a half a cent or a quarter or whatever, I'm not proposing we do that today. I'm just saying that um once we reach 9.25 25. Um, this is a half cent on top of that. But what is it? Does this prec Because this is a 30-year tax. Um, it's very sticky. It's like stake prices. It doesn't ever go down. You know, once you raise the price, it's it it is what it is. So, does that leave us open to more of these proposed um taxes from agencies like Slowco Cog now that what's our new threshold above the 9.25 by doing this? So, we actually got um SB 333 passed through Senator Leair. And what that means is we are um able to add this additional 0.5% tax strictly for transportation. And that does preserve um the city's ability to still reach their tax cap. And so, this additional taxation would not be included in um the official city count.

But does this open the door for more If it did, it would have to go through specific legislation to be passed in the state level. Yes. At the state level. So, at the current moment, no. But, um, are there people pushing for that like for the future? I mean, there are people already talking about doing that. Not that we're aware of. No more questions. Thank you, Mayor Promand Dereas.

Thank you. Um, actually, this is a perfect slide to have up. um the local roads repair safety improvements the the metascular allocation of 2 million I understand well it was in here that it needs to be used within the fiscal year or we could apply for a 36month extension to be able to use that. So that part I understand it but then now I read it and it says regional project. So, I don't I don't know if it's just a typo or what what how that is, but I'm sure that's for our allocation. We've got one year or we can apply for 36 months. The 4.9 million that would be North County, that's us and pass and and whatever and I guess at the grade level. How was that how long can that money pile up over the years before somebody has to say you guys got to use do it on some improvement somewhere along the corridor?

Yeah, definitely. So, the $2 million is strictly delegated for a task and you guys can just hang on to that. Um, we do want to see, of course, receipts and track what is spent just to ensure it's being spent correctly, but that's not something that we control. That's something that the city of Tascadero controls for the regional projects. Um, let's see. Oh, so okay. So, the 2 million is okay. So, I guess that I am reading that correctly. So, that is for regional projects that must be spent within the year. Mine.

Yes. When I was speaking with city manager, I totally misunderstood that and I thought that was when we got our 2 million, we had to use it within the year or or ask for an extension. Okay. So, I understand that differently. So now I am curious about that because it is a whole sort of north countywide and not just the Tascadero. At what how long is it how long do we all have to come together and say okay we're going to spend this money on this portion or of the of the corridor to be able to you know I mean you got the three you got 36 months to be able to do that. It seems like those projects are going to be a lot more than four or five million.

Yeah. And

I mean I can maybe answer that too. So a lot of these um regional projects they could be interchange improvements or you know could be something on El Camino Riale or whatever. And um you know these are usually driven and recommended but get included in the regional transportation plan. And then um as far as funding, they're not always funded until you know they go through a process usually with the advisory committees to the SLCOG board. Um so the TEAC which both Mr. bets I sit on and um you know there's there's two other groups that make recommendations to the slow cog board on funding uh different projects but it's um you know if there's a very large project let's say u 46 in Union Road and it's going to be 10 to 15 million they might need a couple years you know to store up the amount of money to fund that they might be also looking at grants there might be some grant uh limitations on when they get the grants. They might have to, you know, wait a year or so to get the grants to do it. So, I think the idea is with talking staff is that they want to be flexible with that as much as possible. So, you know, they just don't want another I'll just say a Brisco road. You know, that would seem like it was on the the books for a long long 20 years, I guess. So they they really want to see projects happen and they don't want to see you know failure to to start these projects. So I think that's the whole intent of this uh requirement. I think the confusing thing that's driving these questions though is we know that nowadays an interchange project or something bigger like 46 Union Road

outside of Paso. These are multi multi multi multi multi-year pro you know things from inception to completion. So it just seems weird to say it was 24 but even 36 months they're not going to accumulate the necessary funding and and even you know getting state matching funds or whatever in three years. I mean that just doesn't happen nowadays. So I don't understand this what's driving this other than the idea of get moving do something. you know, we want to see it spent on projects and that's the underlying thing is we want and the public wants to see completed projects, but realistically speaking, if we're pursuing, you know, doing something at Santa Rosa or Sanmo, we know it's not 36 months. You know, it was probably 12 months and when they built it in the 60s from idea to completion, that's not the world we live in anymore, unfortunately. So I don't understand and I think that's kind of what's driving my colleagues questions is why is this here this way and then the entire pot I mean is the entire pot going to be directed towards one project one important project I mean you mentioned the one that you mentioned it's like well we've got some interchange issues you know some uh on the 101 that need to be addressed as well so do we wait for the other projects to get done or I mean do they all fall in line or can this 4.9 million be dispersed and Okay, we're going to save up several pots in order to get it done. But even doing that, as the mayor said, is it's going to take many, many years to be able to get to build up the equity to be able to do it. Uh James Worthley, Slowco staff, you're right. Some of the large highway projects take a long time to get through and the 36 months is along the same lines as Mr. bar just uh determined which is a Brisco road improvement that

lasted 20 years with regional funds sitting there that we lost out on the cost of inflation of using that $6 million for what reason. Now the SLOCOG board will be the ultimate determination of what happens with those funds and a major project that takes let's say six years, eight years, if it's still a major project and it's still moving forward and still progressing unlike what Brisco did, then the Slog board can extend it for 36 months once, twice, or more times. If it takes nine years, you get the extension. It's not just the highways. There are regional corridors though. Regional C. This city won regional funds for eliminating the other jurisdictions go hey why haven't you fixed you know we gave you a million dollars to do something in El Camino as a locally controlled project. That should happen fairly quickly. So okay got it. Any other questions, Mark? Okay. I I have one before I pass it down. You know, in terms of the regional funds, uh to be realistic, I mean, I I you know, love the 55% straight to the cities, totally under our control. The regional projects to to be realistic, we're actually in competition, if you will, to some degree with Paser Robels and with the county in terms of uh you know, for Templeton all the way out to Shanden or what have you. And I think the concern obviously as an individual jurisdiction is that over time we get our fair share. But going back to I think council member Peak's earlier question um you the overall slowco board is going to approve these regional projects. So, you know, Pastor Robels has this grand project of, you know, an overpass at 46 in Union Road and we want to, you know,

fix a couple of overpasses here and maybe the county wants to do something in Templeton or way out in Shanden, you know, on 46. Um, I think the only concern is and if and maybe council member News knows this better, but as I've seen the slowcog board over years is they're going to try to balance that out over time because otherwise, you know, I don't want to sit here year after year and oh, you know, the rest of the the uh slowcog board goes, oh, no, we we're going to put all this regional money towards Union Road and 46. and they do that year after year and then we never see a a share of the regional funds for, you know, an overpass and a Tascadero. So, um I mean I think you know undeniably at some point we're get a little bit in competition with each other, but how do we make sure everybody plays fair in the sandbox?

Definitely one of the best ways is you can definitely leverage the funding you get from your specific uh 55% allocation. So, um, building that over the years, obviously fixing something in a Tascadero would be a lot, um, say just theoretically traffic way or another intersection would be a lot less expensive than what would go on on Union Road out in Pasa Robels. And it's something that uh, we know is important and you have uh, two representatives on the board of directors who uh, would be able to advocate for the city of Atascadero. And there's also uh once again this is where the oversight committee comes into play because they will be kind of looking on the back end of things on how the money is spent and where projects are getting completed. So and it also comes to shovel ready projects. So say if the Union Road projects taking a lot longer to kind of get off the ground if the Tascadero has something that's ready to go that project is most likely going to get more priority compared to something out on Union Road. So it's not something obviously it's all theoretical right now but it's something that slow clockog does take seriously and um the board does take seriously and wants to make sure that these projects

would the regional money also kind of gravitate towards those projects that have the greatest chance at getting state or federal matching money because that again might favor you know a particular project in one jurisdiction over projects in other jurisdictions.

Definitely. And the biggest thing with the with potentially this amount of funding coming into the area is that we'll be able to leverage more funds. So say Tascadero has saved up um some of their money over the years and the grant there's grant opportunities. Slowcog's of course able to help with kind of applying and looking for those grants and finding the best opportunities. So once again, the grant funding is also a little theoretical as well, but um it's about the projects kind of being shovel ready and um able to get off the ground.

And I and I can attest the last 11 years being on the TEAC committee um I mean this happens all the time. There's projects, you know, they might say, "Okay, we're going to seed some money from this fund for a grant leveraging grants and that they don't get the grant, let's say." So that money goes back in the pot and it gets reallocated to something else. And um so there's always money being moved around to different projects. But um there is a priority uh project list you know that they've developed and it's usually based on a criteria of you know shovel ready how you know importance and everything else. So kind of weeds out a lot of the projects that maybe aren't don't rise to the top of importance, you know, um for congestion or whatever it might be. So um yeah, it seems like every TTEC meeting we're looking at the project list and and uh money is being shifted around just based on status of the project.

All right. Thank you. Uh Council Member Funk. Sure. Just continuing on this theme for a second. I want I do want to make sure that I got this that that um if um if we have a project that takes as long to get all of the funding together as say the 101 improvements at PIMO Beach where they're trying to add a lane I mean how long how many years has that been on the books as a priority so project I can if you want to answer that at least probably seven

yeah quite a long time and the problem is that we didn't have funding to leverage. So obviously if we had funding to leverage it would have gone a lot quicker. Um do you know the specific

I believe staff started identifying the problem the slowdowns in the Shelby Beach Straits 20 years ago. 20 years ago the volumes there were higher than they are here. Last eight years I think that volumes in North County have reached those levels also. But waiting for state funds to dribble in is what's taken the bulk of the time, 20 years. Having money to leverage grants like the neighboring counties did with their $300 million, leveraging another $600 million, that's how you get projects done faster,

right? Okay. Understood the uh principle there. Um my concern is simply that if it if it takes I mean this we're looking at leveraging maybe matching money or maybe a little better than matching money given the numbers that you were presenting. So if we've got $5 million a year for North County regional projects roughly um that and it takes now $30 million to to do one. We're talking about three years of getting something to get of of all of the money being set aside for that project and trying to get matching grants which may or may not come together and you know you you these things may take longer to put together. So do I understand correctly that while the deadline to spend this money is three years for regional projects that that three-year deadline could be then re-uped if the project is active. we're working it and we're just trying to get all the money together.

Yes, absolutely. So, basically, we have that in there. Um, as was referenced, uh, a former project that kind of just sat for a very long time and nothing happened with it. We want to ensure um, the money is spent appropriately along with the money is spent efficiently. So if it's obviously waiting to be um for a grant to come through or something and the project is actively being looked at and actively being worked on, that's definitely consideration would be consideration for the Slohawk board to kind of make that extension past the third the initial 36month time period. What that does is it just kind of puts in a guideline so people know that um they can should be able to spend the money in a um kind of an efficient way and obviously the it's a tight guideline and we understand that and these things take a very long time but um we are definitely able to work with each jurisdiction. So we want to be successful and we want you guys to be successful. So that's why we put in the tight guideline but also have the ability to be flexible with the jurisdictions.

Yeah. So good news, bad news. You know, the bad news is, you know, for the next like three to five years, probably all the north county money is going to go to something on the 101, maybe the 101 and 46 for Paso. Um, and we would be in in line later because our our next project is probably lower in in priority with Slowco Cog than that intersection that people are, you know, crashing into all the time. Um, the the good news would be, as I understand it, that we could use some of our extra $2 million that would be coming to us to do the upfront work and pay for it to get project shovel ready so that when that process slows down, we raise our hand and say, "We'll take that. We got a shovel ready. Let's go." Am I understanding this correctly?

You explained that better than me, so yes. Thank you. Okay. Very good.

If I can I add um there's a lot of other funding sources that they're allocating right now too. You know there's you know federal and state funding steps and other things. Then we have all other funding like USHA and uh other leveraging monies that we can and can use towards you know these projects. And sometimes I mean for instance a good example is our downtown El Camino project. we ended up being short and we got another Betterment grant and we were ready to go and um you know that it got allocated from something else that wasn't ready to go and then they made that project whole with some other monies uh that became available like next year you know because that project wasn't fully funded or ready to go.

Okay. So chance favors the prepared mind. Okay. Um, one other tr the question much less uh consequential. Um, I'm having some trouble understanding why what's the difference between twice yearly and twice per programming year and how that actually reduces the amount of time. I mean, we love your faces, but three of you have spent your entire lovely evening here with us. Um, and we do not want you to have to do that twice a year. So basically the programming cycle is every two years and when they're going through that cycle there's a time when they're giving a proposal of a potential budget. So it would be kind of a discussion on how this funding would how this particular $2 million or potential the funding from the um regional projects would be spent. And then that of course most likely will come back to council maybe a few weeks or a few months later and then there would be an additional um just kind of reinforcement of that uh information. So basically we're asking for once per year as opposed to twice per year.

Okay. So um may I simply suggest that once per year would be really clear or uh twice per two-year programming cycle. Um well, you know, either one of those would be uh less confusing than trying to explain that a year is not actually 12 months, a year is 24 months. That that had helped me a lot because what we want to avoid here is the natural tendency of bureaucracies to justify themselves by having to do lots of reporting to everybody. And you guys having to show up twice a year to everything under the sun wastes a lot of money. that if if thing if this thing passes we want that money to be spent on roads not seeing you. Thank you.

Excuse me. Mayor is a point of clarification for the council and from Slowcog. I believe the plan in front of you is the final plan approved by the Slowcog board. So we aren't at liberty to edit this or change or make suggestions. You had that a month ago. I think tonight's discussion is does the council support the final plan as it is or not? Is that correct? So I I think we aren't in a spot where we can make amendment to it. That's the thing. I mean I mean you're correct in the observation. It's confusing. Could being worded better, but we're not in a position to change it at this point. Yeah. Okay. Uh but just to clarify, it does reduce it to an average of once per year versus two. Right. We understand your answer. It's just kind of poorly worded. So all right. Thank you. Uh Council Member Newsome.

I have no questions. Okay. Um, yeah, I think I answer I asked mine and um I think I'm good. Let's uh open this up to the public and then we'll bring it back for comments by council.

Jeff Hustelin. Um I'm going to start with the positive that this presentation was way better than the one that we sat through before. It's much much more organized. Um, funding's always great. I'm always concerned about will we have grant money down the line or not. Um, my belief is we passed our sales tax measure here. Um, and because of that, we became a wealthy city in the eyes of grants. So, we're not getting a lot of dollars for fire department, police department because we're self-funding it based on what we did. Now, we probably couldn't afford to do it. You know, it's a catch 22. I I don't have a problem with the procedure of this, but my take and I think a lot of the public's take is not going to change. We can support the way that this is written and ask them to possibly go forward or not on a sales tax, but let's look at what CALR is doing. Nothing. Let's look at uh what the state's doing going broke. Um they want to add a possible mileage tax to your vehicle. Um, I don't see this, and no offense, I served with James on a committee, I don't see this passing the way the state is now. So, I still say this to our council. Do we need to support it or do we not? I'm not sure. Um, and I don't see the funds really going to us other than the $2 million because they're going to work

on priorities first. If you look at the James Dean corner, that took years and a lot of pressure by everybody within the county and the state and funds were retracted and then brought back and Jordan Cuttingham and others really pushed it to get it through to make it a safer corridor. We know what Paso's doing and where the problems are on 46 and 101 and I see it going that direction before it ever benefits a task. Personally, um I don't know, I lived here with Quester Grade being a very small road and then expanding to three lanes. Um that happened twice, once in the 80s and once a few years ago. Um, so I'm not sure if it's in our best interest or not to support this. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Uh, anybody else from the public wishing to speak on this item? Okay. Seeing no no one, I will bring it back to council for discussion and then ultimately we need to make a motion one way or the other. Um, I will start with comments on my right this time with Council Member Nome. I appreciate that. Slowcog has put in a lot of effort to bring this forward. I know it's been a challenge. Not everybody always agrees with um but I think it's something that probably should be put out there to the voters to see if that's what they want. Okay. Thank you, Council Member Funk.

Yeah. Um, I want to thank the slow cog staff for taking our our previous comments seriously and doing some fine-tuning in this this approach so that we can have something that is more efficient for all the jurisdictions and does a better job so that if it is passed, it is something that that looks like it can work. And my understanding tonight is we're not re making a recommendation on whether this should whether voters should support this or even whether this should be put on the ballot. But if voters choose to approve it after it is put on the ballot by uh um the board of supervisors or by um uh the citizen initiative or whatever that that we would approve of this plan for the expenditure of these funds and and I can work with that and you could clean up the language later.

Thank you. Um, I would comment that, you know, anytime, you know, you're going to you put something on the ballot and then it's essentially asking the voters whether or not they want to increase the tax, uh, you know, the relevant question is, you know, what what are we going to pay and what are we going to get out of it and the way this plan is written, I see it as particularly beneficial to Tascadero because in terms of what our citizens would have put into it, we're basically going to get that back right away in the 55% that comes directly to of our city to fund direct, you know, directly city controlled projects. So, we're essentially ahead of the game day one uh with with this expenditure plan, then we have our opportunity to partake in the regional funds. And, you know, we may not always, you know, uh win that argument. Uh I would take it frankly that sometimes improvements on Highway 46 might have more emotional appeal to some others but we will get some share of the regional money. Then you have that third pot of by having this money you're so much more competitive for the state and federal matching grants and it's some of these larger scale projects that there simply isn't you know currently enough funding and you're not competitive for state and federal grants. putting ourselves in play for that third pot of money puts us even further ahead of the game. So that for our citizens, you know, this measure would be a darn good deal um in particular, probably almost more than any other city in the county. And so I'm very comfortable that for a task, it's a very good expenditure plan and uh feel very comfortable. And you know, you just you let the voters decide. I mean, if they say yes, great. will use the money to good effect. If they say no, then you know they're making a choice. So, I feel very comfortable with approving the plan and approving them, you know, going ahead and putting it forward.

I don't have a whole lot more to add. Um, I couldn't agree with the mayor more. Thank you very much for your presentation and the changes, I guess, that were made since the last time we were here. But I think it's a it's a good deal for a task and I feel comfortable with supporting it as well. Council member B.

Yeah. Thank you. Um we are endorsing it as a city council. I mean we're you can put it to vote and you can say that we're not but uh if we say yeah let's push it forward then as a city council we are endorsing that we want it to be um decided upon by the voters. And if something was something that majority were saying we don't want to do it, uh then we would be signaling that it's not right for the city. I think um uh we had D20, we had F-14 that turned into L24, got sewer rate increases last year, we have sewer rate increases this year, probably more down the pike. Um, I mean, if we wanted to raise $2 million, we could just raise our own half cent sales tax and repave Amipoa as a SEO. We can take care of our town. I don't see the net benefit of a regional pool um outweighing the public sentiment of raising our taxes right now. And u I'm a no.

Okay. With those comments, do I have a motion? Right. I mean I to be clear, let me find let me find the commentary. But I I mean I will move uh um yeah I you know yeah I I will move approval with move that we adopt the draft resolution approving the slowco fin final draft transportation expenditure plan for potential transportation sales tax measure. I'll second. Okay. We have a motion by Mayor Borau, a second by Mayor Promanderas. Can we roll call, please? Council member Funk, yes. Council member Nuome, yes. Council member Peak, no. Council member I mayor promises, yes.

Mayor Bro, yes. Matt, motion passes 41 with council member Peak and no.

Okay. All right. Thank you. We will move on to the next item which uh as indicated is item D6 which we had pulled earlier from the consent calendar. This is this uh regarding the 2026 to30 animal control services agreement with the county. Um, and uh, I don't want the chief to have to go through a full presentation on this, but just kind of respond to questions. Um, my concern, of course, is $396,000. This is over well over this is over $1,000 a day, over $30,000 a month for this services. And I was on the council some time ago when Atascadero and Paser Robels initially said no, we're not going to participate um in the the new grand uh animal shelter. Um we thought, you know, we it was just way too expensive. We didn't like the way they were calculating costs. Uh they said they would change some things. They I think they they did for a little bit, but now we're back to the here's your bill, pay it, and shut up uh mode of operation. at least in my mind and I'm what my questions are is looking back to the the calculations as to how how the bill is arrived at. It's a three-year rolling average of or or averaging the previous three years of kind of like a tascadero's share of the expenses of running animal control both in terms of paying for the very expensive building there but also in terms of the operational piece and before there was um looking back to an old you know old report there was a substantial level of detail as to how the numbers were calculated and and my concern concern was that we we or you chief since it falls under your purview is you know looking at the inputs to these cost calculations. In other words, how are

they determined? Um and and do we have any ability to lessen the amount of service, if you will, that a tasker uses? Because at the time, five years ago, we in Paso had by far the highest costs, higher highest percentage of costs um much more than other cities. And um and I'm curious, do you know what our percentage is now? Because back then it was like 14% was a Tascadero and 18% was Pastor Robas. I I do have that. As a matter of fact, uh if we could put that I I I I got a hold of Eric Anderson. He's the manager down there and he sent me some information uh that I thought might be helpful to help answer some of these questions. So, I don't have those in your packet, but I do have uh something I can display for you. And uh Luke is going to help us get that that up. Oh, I have control. And since I'm just going to skip right to the numbers here and I think this is the uh the numbers that you're looking for under the projected percentage under a Tescadero the 12.62% would be that three-year um where we are currently on that three-year uh rolling average and that is the representation that we uh represent.

Okay. Um that shows you know our percentage 12 which is at 12.62% 62% of the total cost which is you know better than the 1437 back in 201 you know 1516 um but in terms of the components at the time there was some level of detail as to you know it was like how many animals were being picked up in a task and at the time it was like was there anywhere to reduce that and I know we pursued the idea or pressed on the idea that okay we don't need you to pick up stray cats in a task right um but I I'm reading a coordination and that's actually been implemented.

It it has. So they are working under that implementation. Uh they are not picking up stray cats. Uh there is a uh a methodology and a a philosophy to that and how it actually can uh can reduce uh length of stay of the animals. Uh which may have been part of the reason why we reduced from 14 something% to to 12.62%. Um yes. So the answer the short answer to that is yes that is where we are with that.

Okay. And I'm just curious so is there any other um opportunities for us to look at what are the service what are the cost drivers for a task at error any any ways that we could that we would control those or be able to reduce those.

Right. So since uh you know the uh the thing that offsets the cost is the revenues and so where we might have an opportunity for any type of revenues is uh you know trying to encourage people to license their animals. This can help reduce the length of stay because now you know the animals that maybe are picked up will either be returned uh to the owner right away or um the length of stay for that particular animal will be very very short. Uh so trying to get more licensing uh done is a way to uh to offset some of our costs. Um really other than that, you know, the uh the uh stray not picking up the stray cats was a was a uh cost reduction obviously, but um really it's a lot of call for serviceoriented. That's how that's how the the costs are generated. So it's it's hard to reduce those calls for service.

Okay. All right. Thank you, Council Member Funk. I believe you had questions.

Yes, and I I asked quite a few questions on this in advance um with the same kinds of concerns that the mayor has just been expressing uh back when, you know, a number of years ago. Uh essentially, the county had a whole racket going on where they would sweep up all the stray cats and feral cats in a task and, you know, take them in down to the county. The cats were miserable. They would keep them for, you know, weeks because nobody was coming to pick up these feral cats, of course, and um and then they would end up euthanizing the cats and and charging us for that extended length of say, and we had no power to change it, and they used that to push off a lot of the the shared costs onto our community. Um so that's why I call it a racket. Um, I want to be very mindful in as we go forward. I want to see the staff be mindful um of not letting the county push costs off onto our community. And that means managing monitoring the metrics, looking at the right performance metrics. Um, that's why I asked the length of stay should be a performance metric that is monitored. It was not mentioned in the packet and I was relieved to hear from you chief that that that is in fact closely monitored and monitored by animal type. Yes.

Because this does vary. Um, like the mayor, I want to see us looking for opportunities to manage the costs that we that animals in our community impose on the system and whether there are ways that we can manage things better so that we impo impose and incur fewer costs so we're not carrying such a heavy load of the the overall thing. Um,

can I add something real quick? Um, uh, you know, I wasn't here a couple years ago when all that took place. Uh, but what I can tell you over the last two years that I have been here, the, um, communication and the relationship that I've had with the the management down there with Eric Anderson has been very transparent. If I ask for something or data or whatnot, he will provide it. He's very proactive. Uh, they have been living up to their obligation of having their annual and bi-annual meetings with us. Um so um my experience so far has been very um positive and I would anticipate that if we had any questions and any details that we really wanted to to know more about uh he's been very very good about that.

It might be helpful to have you know some kind of briefing. We had the occasion for this briefing that have some some occasional uh you know once a year or something here here how things are going with that so that we know that that's um that relationship is staying constructive and that they that our taxpayer costs are being spent u as efficiently as possible. The other thing where I want to see performance metrics communicated on and discussed is on euthania. Um it is unfortunately always necessary with pets um sometimes to do that. Um most of us who have pets have had to to put down an animal um that just is not where it can live on and it's hard. But what we want to w monitor for is whether the the shelter is going back into euthanizing animals that um are adoptable but just haven't been adopted in particular because um at le private side of this with woods they routinely get animals from other communities because we don't have as many animals to adopt here as people are willing to adopt. So, I want to make sure if we're getting into a situation of avoidable euthanasia of animals that um there's communication about it so that those who care about animals in the community can organize for action and maybe make that not have to happen.

I think that we can ask for that data, but I mean that's you know kind of their operational uh considerations how they how they do that. Sure. I just it wasn't on the performance metric and I want and and so we need to see that in the data. Got it. Thank you. Okay. Does any other member of the council have any questions? Okay. Seeing none, I'll see if there's any public comment. No public comment coming forward. Then we'll return it back to council for a motion. I'll move approval of uh consent item number six. I'll second it. Okay. We have a motion by Council Member Funk, a second by Council Member Nome. Roll call, please. Council member Funk, yes. Council member Newsome, yes. Council member Peak, yes. Mayor Pro Timas, yes. Mayor Bau,

yes. Motion passes 50. Okay, excellent. We will move on then to um council announcements and committee reports. We'll start on my left, Council Member Peak. Yeah, we get to meet with the city uh the city and schools committee this Friday uh at the district office, which would be great to get some updates from um from school district staff. Um, other than that, you know, there are a few different service club um, things going on the next couple months around town and I'm looking forward to a beautiful spring.

Caps met last Thursday. Unfortunately, I don't have any of my notes. So, um, but there wasn't really anything of really note to to report. Uh, and that's all I have. Thanks. All right. Thanks. I'll just report tomorrow is the city selection committee. Doesn't meet very often. This is my first time attending the city selection committee uh as mayor and we will be discussing appointment to LAFCO and council member Funk is an applicant for that position. Um and um that's all I have to report

as the mayor's just reported where I'll be at nine o'clock tomorrow. Um also on Thursday morning there is a special meeting of the homeless services oversight council at 9:00. um that's I believe directed at um some uh grant approvals that um for which the timing was couldn't accommodate our regular meetings. Um and there was a meeting last uh week of the Atascadero Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Um and I uh diligently attempted to join um remotely um under the uh rules that allow that after conferring with the city attorney and getting clearance for uh joining remotely. But the technology was unsuccessful in my being able to join in. Uh so I ended up uh texting my questions to John Neil who was staffing that particular committee and um and at least get being engaging with the conversation. Um I will continue to follow up because the link I was using to connect was a link that was available for members of the public who might also wanted to watch that meeting. And not only was I unable to participate, I was unable to see the meeting. And so that's a a problem for how that the agency operates, but it's a technical glitch and we'll all get over it. And I believe uh Nick was there representing the city's interests, Mr. Debar. And that the uh only exciting thing was that we approved the annual water report for going out for people to review it. Right. Okay. Thank you,

Council Member Nome. I have nothing to report. All right. Thank you all. Does anybody have any individual determinations? Seeing none, meeting adjourned.