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The board voted unanimously to rescind the enforcement on STRs to enter a Stay of Proceedings until Feb. 1.
After two months of deliberation and meetings with attorneys, the Highlands Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to enter a Stay of Proceedings, which delays the enforcement of the short-term rental ban scheduled for Jan. 3, until Feb. 1, 2022.
Before voting on the matter, the board heard public comments from the public on short term rentals.
Public Comments
Jennifer Huff, representing the Save Highlands group, started the public comment section.
“As we all know, the town decided to enforce a ban on vacation rentals and the Save Highlands group has challenged that decision in court,” Huff said. “We have already discussed the benefits to our community by owners who graciously share their homes with our Highlands visitors. Likewise, others have voiced their opposition to vacation rentals. Our hope is that now we can move past the negativity and come together discuss and design a solution that addresses the concerns of all sides of this matter. The message here is very simple. Local residents and second homeowners need to work together in a collaborative effort with the town to develop solutions that don’t disadvantage any member of this community. Together, we can provide solutions while welcoming visitors the economy depends on. It is clear with the passion around this topic that we all have a love for this community, and we all have a part to play in maintaining Highlands as the special place that it is. Tonight, we are asking this board to reverse its previous vote and show the strong leadership required to unify this town once more.”
John Richardson said he has lived in Highlands on Lynn Lane for the past 10 years.
“Our residency in Highlands has ranged from visiting family friends as teenagers, staying in popup campers, local lodging and we have owned a second home in Highlands for 10 years,” Richardson said. “We have seen Highlands change from a quaint town where the restaurants would close down after New Years, to a year-long community. Why am I here? I currently serve on a local property owner’s association, as well as one in Chattanooga. Given that, I look at things different than what the typical homeowner may not see. Tonight, I do come as an individual, not representing any property owner’s association. I’m speaking for myself, period. As a homeowner, I have some concern as to what’s happening. I see the discussion and confrontation related to the short-term rentals. I’m concerned about changes I see happening to and around our neighborhood. When looking at the bigger picture, I think Highlands has a bigger problem than just short-term rentals. Unless something changes, I understand that the town will start restricting short term rentals come January. My position is one that I have heard before, if the zoning doesn’t allow then I agree the town should enforce its ordinances as it has on the books. During the short time that I have actually lived here, I’ve seen several instances I consider unequal or non-enforcement. I want the town to be consistent in its ordinance enforcement across all ordinances. I see several areas where enforcement by the town is not consistent. My neighborhood is in R-1 zoning and is filled with about 20 percent short term rentals. Many of the owners are absentee landlords and they seem to be managed well.”
Rick Segal commented that the town should look at this issue in two different ways.
“The town should look at this issue in a short-term view and a long term view,” Segal said. “Immediate impact on the economy and what is happening today is very encouraging. Retailers and stores benefit from the increased traffic. Shops and restaurants see more customers and absolutely, real estate sales, current property value and property management folks are feeling the benefits. I would like to interject one small fact. The economy of Highlands is not depressed. It is not depressed. We made it through 2008 when the economy took a hit and we made it through 2001 when our country took a hit. Let’s try and look at this from another. Why has real estate inventory gone down so dramatically? Who’s buying these properties and for what purpose? Are they local folks moving up in life or people looking to just cash in on a trend? Yes, property values have escalated significantly over the past year, but what’s the effect of that? Folks who want to move into a residential area, want to live and work here find the prices prohibited. The people who own the majority of these rental homes realize that short term rental prices offer much higher profits than long term rentals. As more and more of the homes in our community become rentals, and that is the trend we are seeing in Highlands, the numbers of rentals go up and the number of people living in residential areas goes down. In my neighborhood, Shelby Place, we are today 23 homes. Among those homes, seven are being rented. Some of the rentals are for longer terms, which don’t create a problem, but if STR’s are permitted to continue in residential areas, who is to say they won’t all become short term rentals. There is no doubt in my mind that we will see property values decline. Slowly but surely, these neighborhoods will cease to be neighborhoods. The Town of Highlands will become unrecognizable. This is where we will see the long-term effects of this will be. I don’t think any of us Highlanders are against short term rentals. The question should be should they be allowed to take over areas that were created for single family homes. What would be the fate of these areas? The town could look at the current zoning regulations and I encourage them to do so. The question that I was asked was what was the intent of the writers of the R-1, R-2 and R-3 zones. I contend that the aim of these writers was to keep the residential areas protected against potential use. The ordinance as written does just that. The concern here is present. The concern is not for today. The concern is for five years from now. Is the sugar high worth it?”
Patty Uffelman and her husband are full time residents of Highlands and live in the Bowery neighborhood.
“I am speaking against short term rentals based on my experience in Charleston, South Carolina, where we lived before here for 20 years,” Uffelman said. “During the last few years that we lived in Charleston, short term rentals were a real hot topic issue. Because of the widespread negative effects they were having on the community. Personally, in our neighborhood, we experienced an uptick in trespassing, noise, parking problems and the loss of friends and neighbors who moved away by choice because they had gotten fed up with it all, as we eventually did. The effects were much worse in other communities, especially working-class communities. The reason things were so much worse there was because people rented their homes instead of owning them. So, when the homeowners were presented with a buyer, they would buy, and working-class people were literally forced out of their homes. In their wake, there were actually several small churches downtown that had to close because they lost local people who would come to their services and support them. Shortly after we left, the City of Charleston did pass sweeping restrictions on short term rentals, and that did make a difference, but it was already too late for us. Before choosing Highlands as our new home, we very carefully reviewed the town’s ordinances to make sure that residential areas would be protected from short term rentals and we believed then and we believe now that the current ordinance, which prohibits overnight commercial accommodations, was intended to prevent short term rentals in residential areas. So, I am surprised and a little bit disappointed to be speaking on this issue tonight and feel like my new community and neighborhood are at risk. I am asking the mayor and town board to maintain the ban on short term rentals in R-1 areas and I also ask you to continue to monitor their effects in other areas of the community. Based on my experience, I cannot tell you how important this is in order to maintain the livability of our community.”
Chris Weller has a house and a short-term rental on Bowery Road.
“I have heard people talk about short term rentals in a manner that I don’t recognize,” Weller said. “My wife’s family has been in Highlands since the 1920s. The property that we own, we purchased in 2015 was my wife’s great grandmother’s and her name was Ms. Evans. When we purchased it, there were two small cottages on the property, and they were dilapidated. When the realtor sold it to us, he said, ‘Congratulations, you just bought the eye sore of the neighborhood.’ We decided to redo both of the cottages. We had a builder walk off during the project. As a result, we decided to turn one of the cottages into a short-term rental. We took all of that money and turned it back into the property, landscaped the property, updated the cottages into beautiful facilities and we have never had a single problem with any of our renters that we have had over the last four years. We are good neighbors, and we are actively involved in the neighborhood association. If people have moved to Highlands thinking that there weren’t going to be any short-term renters, they don’t know anything about Highlands. Highlands has been a vacation destination for years and years and in fact, it was specifically founded as a vacation destination by the original founders for people in Atlanta. That is actually in the planning documents that the town produced back in July. There is a way that we can all live together in harmony, but to label all short-term renters as people who are out of town and don’t care about Highlands is just false. We only rent one of our cottages. We stay in the other cottage. It is our personal home, and we intend to retire in the next few years to that cottage and expand it for ourselves. There are several people who own short term rentals in this town who have family property and their ability to actually rent out their place has helped them to refurbish their homes, landscape their yards, put their kids through college and be participants in the community. They are all actively involved in Highlands. You act like we don’t care about Highlands. That we are bad neighbors. I can’t tell you how many people I send to the restaurants of Highlands, to the fishing guides to the hotels to the spas. All of these people create economic energy for the entire town and if you have somebody who has a problem with garbage or noise, there are ways to approach that. That can be directly resolved with the owner, or through the police department. I just want to let people know that there are many people out there who have STRs that are good neighbors and good owners. With respect to somebody who said they just want the town to enforce the law, I’m all for enforcing the law. I’m an attorney. I researched the regulations before I bought my house, and I knew what the short-term rental prohibition and non-prohibitions rules were. I relied on those. I invested and my wife invested a lot of money in order to establish these two cottages. I would challenge anybody to come by our house and find out what kind of neighbors we are.
Deliberation from the board
Highlands’ mayor Patrick Taylor said after the last meeting, he and Town Manager Josh Ward met with the attorneys that are reviewing the STR situation.
Taylor appointed Commissioner Amy Patterson and Commissioner Brian Steihler to an advisory information group to meet with attorneys and engage in conversation as the attorneys gather information about short term rentals.
“I asked these commissioners to serve as a sort of resource group because they were on the board when we had the UDO development up to 2010, where it was adopted,” Taylor said. “Here is the situation, that process will continue towards the end of the month. After that, we will be having a joint meeting in November with the town Board of Commissioners and the town planning board. Our attorneys will then, at that time, provide a report, possible options and advice and guidance on how to proceed with this issue. It will be a public meeting and then we will map out a way to continue to address how to deal with the ordinances and address this issue of short-term rentals.”
Town attorney Jay Coward reported that the working group that Taylor appointed has met two separate times for six hours each to discuss the STR situation.
“The last action that the board took required that we reexamine the UDO and try to come up with a better definitions and interpretations of what the UDO means,” Coward said. “That will probably mean that we will have to do some revisions to the UDO and we will have to add some language that addresses the situation of short term rentals. There is nothing in the UDO at all that addresses short term rentals. So, we don’t have a good UDO that we can refer to when trying to decide how to go forward.”
Coward said he anticipates the group will have a working document that will explain to the board of commissioners and the planning board what the final conclusions are in the next week.
“This group is very functional, and we are working really hard to try and address the dilemma that we have,” Coward said. “In the meantime, the group of people that are represented by Mr. Derek Allen brought a lawsuit against the Town of Highlands. And in a very lengthy document, I think there were 275 different paragraphs in this complaint, in that document, it asks for several different things. Chiefly, to allow STRs to continue to operate in the Town of Highlands. Mr. Justice and I talked about this, and we feel that we should talk with Mr. Allen about how the lawsuit would divert the good efforts the town is making in amending this situation and cause us to spend an enormous amount of energy in litigation and very little in trying to address the problem itself. We talked with him about that, and he agreed that there would be little movement of any positive nature if we had an ongoing lawsuit, which would require us to be in court rather than in the conference room working this out.”
Coward suggested to Allen they enter into a Stay of Proceedings, which is an order that would be signed by a judge with the consent of the two parties.
“During this stay, which would last until Feb. 1, there would be no requirement that the town would have to answer the complaint, no discovery conducted, or request for documents and all of that, which would generate an enormous amount of time,” Coward said. “There would be no hearings, court and there would be no presentation of evidence. Everything would be stayed till Feb. 1, pending our attempts to let this work group, the town council and the planning board to make a decision about the UDO. We reached an agreement and we discussed this with eh working group yesterday and they agreed this would be a good thing to present to the full board.”
The draft that Allen has is just that, a draft and is not final according to Coward.
“Mr. Justice and I will be working on it and since he is the one that the town hired because of his expertise, he will be the one heading that effort up,” Coward said. “I tried to get in touch with him today and basically he is not finished with the draft, and we haven’t deferred with Derek Allen about it. The jest of it would be I would be authorized to sign this document on behalf of the board, and we would stop and not attempt to enforce against STRs until we make a decision about what the UDO actually says and that would be by vote of the full board. This would also include the planning board to be participating. So, we think that this could be done by Feb. 1. The board would need to rescind the action it had taken earlier to enforce this order as of Jan. 3 and authorize us to continue to work on the UDO without any enforcement until we reach that point where we have a new revised UDO, or Feb. 1, whichever comes first.”
Commissioner Marc Hehn said he agreed with Coward on entering a stay of proceedings and made a motion to rescind the STR enforcement but was worried that Feb. 1 would not be enough time.
“There is a lot of work to do,” Hehn said. “I don’t think you can put a deadline on it because there is so much to be resolved. July 1, seems like a more reasonable time to me, because you have to have public hearings, meetings with the town board and planning board, and it is just going to take a long time.”
None of the other commissioners agreed and said they believe the work could be done by Feb. 1.
With Commissioner John Dotson seconding the motion, the board voted unanimously to rescind the enforcement on STRs to enter a Stay of Proceedings until Feb. 1.
- By Christopher Smith