(C) Florida Phoenix This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The latest version of a vacation rental bill gets its first hearing in Tallahassee [1] ['Mitch Perry', 'More From Author', '- December'] Date: 2023-12-13 As another legislative session looms in Tallahassee, so comes another attempt by Florida lawmakers to give more power to the state rather than local governments to regulate short-term vacation rental homes in the Sunshine State. Lawmakers have attempted for the past decade to revise the regulation of vacation rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. They seemingly had a deal figured out during the last legislative session, held earlier this year; the next session opens on Jan. 9. But that proposal died on the last day of the session when Pinellas County Republican Nick DiCeglie, sponsor of the bill in the Senate, announced that the amended version that had come back from the House had “weakened local government” and therefore he was killing it but hoped to bring it back again. Among the irreconcilable differences he listed was that the House version gave the Florida Department of Business and Professional (DBPR) sole authority to suspend a vacation rental license for certain violations, and not the local government. But shortly after DiCeglie introduced his new version (SB 280) of the legislation to the Senate Regulated Industries Committee on Wednesday, he was hit with immediate pushback by South Florida Democratic Sen. Jason Pizzo, who said it appeared that the new bill was closer to the House version that DiCeglie had rejected back in May. “There is no indication whatsoever from either the Senate, the House, and especially from the governor’s office that any additional resources are to be given to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and yet you want to take the lion share of responsibility and hand it over to an agency that is objectively woefully ill-staffed and underfunded?” Pizzo asked DiCeglie. “And you think that your constituents in Indian Rocks Beach and mine in Sunny Isles Beach are going to be better served because of the level of uniformity coming out of Tallahassee for the governance of short-term rentals?” DiCeglie responded that his new proposal gives local government “tools” to deal with “bad actors,” but that it makes sense to require the DBPR to have a database “that’s easily accessible for local governments to determine who’s exactly registered with the state.” “If multiple violations of theses ordinances and those registrations are suspended or revoked at the local level, I think that naturally DBPR should have the ability to suspend those licenses at the state level,” he said. History To understand the existing level of negotiations, it’s important to note the history of the regulation of these advertising platforms. It was in 2011 when then Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation that prohibited local governments from enacting any new ordinance regulating or restricting vacation rentals, preempting that power to the state. That legislation allowed about 75 local ordinances that dealt with vacation rentals to be grandfathered in. But after significant pushback from local governments in the following years, the state reversed itself to a certain extent in 2014 and allowed local governments to handle problems such as noise, parking, and trash, but still prevented them from prohibiting or regulating the duration or frequency of short-term vacation rentals. Every year since then there have been legislative attempts to give more power to the state but they’ve come up short every time. On Wednesday, some major stakeholders in the debate expressed reservations about the latest proposal. Samantha Padgett, vice president for government relations for the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, said her organization’s biggest problem with the new bill regarded data transparency. “The bill does not require the platforms to periodically report all of the vacation rentals on their platforms that are for the state of Florida, including the addresses of those units,” she said — adding that without such reporting, advertising platforms would essentially be operating on “an honor system.” The measure would allow local governments to charge no more than $150 to process an individual registration application. Additionally, the bill requires local governments to review a registration application and accept or deny it within 15 days. Occupancy limits The measure allows local governments to impose occupancy limits on short-term rentals as long as they apply the same limits to residential properties. That’s a problem, said Casey Cook with the Florida League of Cities. “We know for a fact that there are more families who are living multi-generationally these says,” he said. “We have grandparents living with parents and kids. To enforce any sort of occupancy standard across the board, across all residential properties, you’re forcing the city to potentially negatively impact those homeowners or those long-term residents that live multi-generationally or frankly just have a lot of roommates to go after or solve a problem that really only exists with vacation rentals.” Brushing off the criticism, DiCeglie said that he had also heard from local government officials within his own district that they support his proposal because “they are getting the tools that they don’t currently have to deal with some of these what I call ‘bad actors.’” But two local officials who testified said they did have problems with the bill. David Will is mayor of Redington Beach, a small coastal community in Pinellas County. He says the Legislature did the right thing in 2014 and should keep to the status quo. “Since 2014, the number of short-term rentals has grown throughout our state, and today the industry is thriving, proving the success of the 2014 legislation and proving that the balance struck was the right solution,” he said. David Birchim is city manager of St. Augustine, which has been ranked nationally as one of the best small towns in the country. He said St. Augustine had been able to “live in harmony” with its mixture of residents and vacation rental housing because of existing regulations that allow the city to manage occupancy, parking, and solid waste generated by vacation and rental homes. However, he feared the new bill would imperil his city’s future. “Without the ability to regulate parking for vacation rentals, we lose quality of life for our residents,” Birchim said. “We don’t want this to turn this into a downward spiral where our residents leave, just to create more vacation rentals. Our fear is that this would result in the loss of our community and turn St. Augustine into nothing more than a theme park.” The measure passed unanimously and has only one other committee (Fiscal Policy) before reaching the floor in the Senate. However, no companion bill has been filed in the Florida House. [END] --- [1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/12/13/the-latest-version-of-a-vacation-rental-bill-gets-its-first-hearing-in-tallahassee/ Published and (C) by Florida Phoenix Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/floridaphoenix/