The Highlands Board of Commissioners has outlined the format for an upcoming public hearing related to the regulation of short-term rental units in residentially zoned areas. The public hearing is scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 25 at the Highlands Community Building on 4th Street.
During the public hearing, speakers are asked to give their take on the Highlands Planning Board’s most recent recommendations and limit their stories of personal experience dealing with STRs. Each speaker will be limited to three minutes, to accommodate as many speakers as possible.
Speakers can begin signing up to be heard beginning at 4:30 p.m. and will be called on as they are listed on the signup sheet. If speakers wish to yield their time to a group representative, they may do so, and that representative will be given a maximum of 15 minutes to address the board. Anyone who can not attend the meeting may submit a written statement via email to gibby.shaheen@highlandsnc.org.
The public hearing comes as rhetoric between the pro-STR group, “Save Highlands,” and the anti-STR group, “The Highlands Neighborhood Coalition,” has increased. Earlier this week, the town received a letter from Ari Bargil, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, advocating Save Highlands’ position and urging the town to scrap its previous proposals related to regulating short-term rental units.
Bargil took specific issue with one previously proposed idea to eliminate short-term rentals in R1 and R2 residential zones via amortization, a process that declares a land use as nonconforming and then outlaws said use after a set amount of time. In theory, amortization allows property owners to recoup some of their investment prior to the use being eliminated completely.
During the planning board meeting on Aug. 9, town attorney Jay Coward noted that amortization may be defensible in court if the town were sued on the matter, but added that amortization has never been used in an attempt to regulate STRs. It has been ruled lawful as a way to regulate “nuisances” such as unpermitted scrap yards and billboards.
“In sum, the town’s proposal deploys legally dubious land-use tools to eviscerate the settled expectations of property owners,” Bargil’s letter stated. “And the supposed legitimacy of the town’s approach rests on a half-century-old legal decision upholding, unremarkably, the power of government to moderate nuisances. Finally, the town’s implementation of the proposed ordinance calls for the creation of a permitting system—something the North Carolina Court of Appeals struck down as unlawful earlier this year. Accordingly, the proposed ordinance also exposes the town to substantial financial liability, in the form of attorneys’ fees, in the seemingly likely event that it will have to defend its unlawful permitting/amortization scheme in court.”
While the idea of amortizing short-term rentals has been included in previous discussions of the town board of commissioners, the planning board proposal up for discussion at the public hearing on Aug. 25 does not include eliminating STRs via amortization. In fact, it doesn’t eliminate STRs in R1 and R2 zones at all, but rather places a minimum stay requirement of 7 days on all STR properties. It also outlines parking requirements, sanitation requirements and citation procedures/penalties related to ordinance violations.
The goal of the planning board’s proposed ordinance is to mitigate problematic properties, or “party houses,” that are rented out for less than seven days as a way to host large numbers of people under one roof for a special event such as a bachelor/bachelorette party, wedding or family reunion.
“A lot of the complaints we have been hearing from neighboring property owners is that some of these STRs are being rented for the weekend and causing problems related to noise, traffic, trash, etc., because they have 12 people staying in a three bedroom house” planning board member Chris Wilkes said during the board’s Aug. 2 meeting. “We need to have an ordinance on the books that works, and a big part of that has to be enforcing what is already in the UDO (unified development ordinance) related to R1 and R2 zones. When you look at places that are dealing with an influx of STRs, places like Charleston, New Orleans, and other much larger cities, they are making progress via enforcement, not by eliminating STRs all together.”
The public hearing related to the planning board’s proposed STR ordinance is scheduled for 5 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 25. It will also be viewable via the Town of Highlands YouTube channel.