With the city planning to enforce steeper financial penalties for properties operating illegally, Chattanooga City Council will decide Tuesday whether to extend by up to six months a temporary pause on new permits for short-term vacation rentals not occupied by the owner.
Council members will consider one of two ordinances. One would extend the moratorium through July 10 and the other through Feb. 7.
Chris Anderson, Mayor Tim Kelly’s senior adviser for legislative initiatives, said he has met with council members individually, and the consensus he’s received from the majority of them is that they want to see at least a few months of enforcement before agreeing to any new rules.
Anderson said the city can have an administrative hearing officer on staff by March, a hiring that would allow the city to boost the fines for illegal rentals from $50 to $500 per day. At that time, the city would also hire three inspectors, which Anderson said with the new hearing officer would collectively cost about $300,000 annually.
“That would give us 90 days of enforcement track record if we have a six-month extension,” Anderson told council members during a recent meeting. “If we have it to your satisfaction before that six months is up, we’re fine moving ahead. There literally is no way for a 30-day extension to show a track record.”
Anderson said the administration hopes to demonstrate how the new hearing officer would function, which would help city officials decide on new regulations.
The council approved a moratorium on new absentee permits in April, which is scheduled to end Jan. 9.
Because the council won’t have meetings Dec. 27 or Jan. 3, and the extension would require two votes of approval to go into effect, the ordinance would have to appear on Tuesday’s agenda in order to prevent a lapse.
“We will be inundated with new applications on Jan. 10 without a new system in place,” Anderson said.
Council Vice Chairwoman Raquetta Dotley, of East Lake, sits on a committee formed to evaluate the city’s rules on short-term vacation rentals. In a phone interview Friday, Dotley said the city doesn’t have the staffing in place to appropriately enforce its regulations, which limit short-term vacation rentals to a designated overlay.
Even so, there are still hundreds of short-term vacation rentals that operate illegally in Chattanooga, with staff estimating in October that the city holds about 450 unpermitted properties.
Dotley agrees city officials need time to see how the new enforcement measures play out, and lifting the moratorium early without concrete measures in place would not be effective government, she said.
“We don’t have the data to show or prove to our constituents … that our enforcement is strong enough to manage short-term vacation rentals at this moment,” she said.
Dotley said most of her constituents aren’t opposed to short-term vacation rentals, but they do have concerns about the effectiveness of the city’s enforcement. The properties can cut into the city’s available housing stock, Dotley said, and if there are too many in a specified area, they can change the character of a neighborhood.
“Neighbors are no longer getting neighbors,” she said. “They’re getting vacationers, and that is not why people moved into the community.”
Reached by phone, Councilwoman Jenny Hill, of North Chattanooga, said city officials heard from residents, investors and vacation rental owners who agreed enforcement was the most important issue to solve before pursuing changes to rules.
“I think it’s critical we give the administration an appropriate and realistic amount of time to make the necessary hires and perfect the processes for enforcement of our current ordinance,” Hill said.
Councilman Chip Henderson, of Lookout Valley, heads the council’s short-term vacation rental committee and said in a phone call Thursday that he intended to present legislation that would enable the city to remove the moratorium.
Although he expected the city would need to expand the moratorium by a month to ensure there was enough time to bring forward changes to the city’s regulations, Henderson said he was caught slightly off guard when staff proposed a six-month extension.
“My gut feeling is we’re not going to have a good, solid track record of enforcement just in that six months, and my fear is we would have to extend that six-month extension even further,” he said.
Contact David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249. Follow him on Twitter @flavid_doyd.