ESTES PARK (AP) – A municipal power struggle is brewing about regulating the number of vacation rentals in Larimer County’s top tourist destination.
Larimer County’s commissioners on Wednesday voted 3-0 to cap the number of vacation rentals in Estes Park and surrounding valley to 700, but the town board declined to support the limit.
“Mr. Mayor we have a problem. We have a serious problem that has never occurred in 16 years,” Estes Park town attorney Greg White said after the commissioners voted. “We have never had a situation where the code has been changed without both boards approving the exact same language.”
The Estes Park trustees have spent a year wrangling with increased regulation of the exploding number of vacation rentals in their town.
There are 339 licensed short-term rentals among the Estes Park Valley’s almost 7,300 homes, up from 206 in 2010.
Since Jan. 1, another 90 homeowners have applied for a new license, most of them prodded to register as increased regulation and potential permit limits loom. That compares to a total of 24 new licenses issued in all of 2013, 30 in 2014 and 50 in 2015.
And town officials estimate there are many more unlicensed homeowners renting to tourists who flood Estes Park for vacations that include visiting Rocky Mountain National Park, one of the 10 most visited national parks in the country.
A proposed amendment to the town’s development code was designed by town planners to increase enforcement of short-term rental licensing, bolster communication between short-term hosts and neighbors and corral rogue renters into a strict licensing program.
Among the many requirements in that amendment – like notifying neighbors, enlisting a 24-hour local manager to handle issues and suspending the licenses of troublemakers – the town’s Planning Commission suggested a 700-permit cap.
Both the county commissioners and town board heard public comment on the proposal Wednesday night.
A steady stream of vacation rental supporters pleaded for more study and clarification of proposed rules that hold homeowners more accountable for their renters and impacts on the neighborhood.
It’s a scene playing out across Colorado as municipalities big and small grapple with vacation rentals seemingly popping up everywhere.
Neighbors bemoan impacts on their communities as homes fill with vacationers. Homeowners trumpet their property rights as they harvest twice as much renting short term versus long-term. City leaders lament lost worker housing as more homes host vacationers. And the real estate brokers, flush with growing sales and management revenue, argue that both property values and tourist economies could suffer with heavy restrictions on so-called “rentalpreneurs.”
Estes Park short-term rental homeowners on Wednesday said complaints related to a few bad operators should not taint their rentals. Nearly all the speakers – many of whom had spoken at previous meetings during the course of a year – asked that the board enforce existing regulations on vacation rentals before adding more rules.
“You don’t have enough information ... to make a regulation that won’t have a lot of problems,” said Seth Smith, a local broker who manages dozens of vacation rental properties in the valley. He urged the board to abandon the cap, calling the proposed limit “pure insanity.”
“This is a massive, massive overstep of government that will take away people’s private property rights,” he said.
Larimer County commissioner Steve Johnson was not swayed.
Citing the town’s 2016 housing-needs assessment, Johnson said 700 renters have been forced to move from their homes in the last five years, roughly 200 of them when landlords converted properties to short-term rentals. He said the town’s employers cite housing as their top problem in finding and keeping quality workers.
“Maybe that’s the free market. Maybe that’s the way it is. Maybe that’s OK. But we should have the ability for the people who work in our community to live in our community,” Johnson said, clicking through a slide showing Airbnb’s growth from 50,000 properties in 2011 to nearly a million today.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that if you don’t have a cap in your community, your community is going to change. The longer you wait, the harder it is to do a cap. This is a really fundamentally important decision that is going to affect Estes Park for generations. And I think it’s a permanent decision,” he said. “What you decide here, you better get it right because you are not going to get a chance to do a do-over.”
Town trustees do not oppose a cap. They just wanted more precise data about the unlicensed renters. If there are already close to 700 short-term renters in their town, they don’t want to stifle future growth.
Many trustees urged their colleagues delay a final vote on a cap until a town task force studying the impact of vacation rentals releases its final report in the fall.“There’s more good in this ordinance than bad,” trustee Ward Nelson said, “but we are just not ready to do it.”
“Well-managed vacation rentals are good for our guests and our economy,” trustee Ron Norris said.
“I think having an unlimited amount of vacation rentals in our town has a vast potential of degrading our way of life,” trustee Bob Holcomb said. “But I cannot support a cap until we have better information.”
The Town Board approved an ordinance that passed the proposed amendment without the cap, promising to return to the potential of limiting short-term rentals later in the year.
But because neither elected board backed down from the underlying premise of their vote, they are at a stalemate.
The commissioners urged the trustees to change their position. The trustees asked the commissioners to reconsider.
Commissioner Lew Gaiter, who amended the resolution his board approved to exclude homes in higher density zoning areas from the cap, asked the trustees to impose the limit and revisit it later.
“It’s much more difficult to add a restriction than it is to remove one,” he said.
Mayor pro-tem Wendy Koenig said she wasn’t sure there were fewer than 700 vacation rentals in town now and a cap at this point “defeats the purpose of getting everyone permitted.”
“Going down your path will grind the registration process to a halt,” trustee John Ericson told the board of commissioners.
