Palm Coast’s debut short-term rental ordinance is heading for approval over the next few weeks as the City Council today, inheriting a draft in the works for months under a largely different council, signed off on it with minor adjustments. The council will vote on the proposal on Dec. 17 and Jan. 7, when the public may yet address it.
Short-term rentals would have to start registering on March 3. Registration is mandatory. Maximum occupancy would be 10 people, not including children younger than 1. The renter must conduct background checks on renters–or certify that a proper background check was conducted. Recreational vehicles, boats and trailers may not be parked on the driveway or in front of the house except for temporary loading and unloading. Emergency lighting is still required, but it may be temporary, inexpensive plug-in devices.
Each rental will have clearly posted notices about parking, noise, garbage and leash regulations. If complaints are lodged with the operator of a rental, the operator must respond within two hours. The advertisement of the rental property must also make clear that the property is in a residential zone. The property owner is ultimately accountable for the complaints.
Short term rental regulations were previously not going to apply to homesteaded, single-family houses occupied full-time by the owner or on-site operators, meaning when the property owner remains in the home while the renters are there. But now they do.
The city’s website, on its code enforcement page, will have a link where residents may lodge complaints about short-term rentals. The public could also look for the status of the violation complaint on the site. Oddly, there will also be links to short-term rental companies so the public may submit complaints directly to those companies, though such links could be confused with advertising.
“I want to move forward with an ordinance, but I do think that this is still going to be a working progress,” Council member Theresa Pontieri said, “because I agree with a lot of people in that we should look into a private enforcement company, a third party company that enforces these STRS, rather than code enforcement.” The reason she’d favor a private company is to get around the public nature of complaints through the city, which have drawn retaliation against complainants, she said.
But a private enforcement company must comply with the same public-record requirements the city follows, if the company were working on behalf of the city, so outsourcing would not shield complainants’ identities or get around the 2021 state law requirements that complaints, to be acted upon, may not be anonymous.
Today’s discussion mostly centered on three issues that lacked clarity: daytime noise, the responsibility for background checks of renters, and who would be accountable for code enforcement complaints. The council and city staff resolved all three, with Mayor Mike Norris shepherding the council to consensus on all three items. He was almost immediately amenable to dropping his proposal for changing the way maximum occupancy was calculated when he saw he had no support. He would have favored two occupants per room, no matter how many rooms are in a house. The rest of the council wanted to stick with the limit of 10 occupants, maximum.
Noise is a major concern. “There’s a lot of daytime noise that’s coming from these from these rentals, because people are there on vacation,” Pontieri said. “It’s disrupting their enjoyment of their home. You have people that are there for bachelor parties, birthday parties, things where there’s a lot of loud music, some of it obscene, and a lot of times it’s coming over the water.”
The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office polices Palm Coast and has a certified decibel meter used for such occasions, but enforcement follows only “if the noise level exceeds the level” of the ordinance, the sheriff’s Comdr. Brian Finn said. Day or night, Palm Coast’s noise ordinance prohibits “loud and raucous noise” that “because of its volume and duration” disturbs people, “from any location not less than 50 feet from the source of any noise, measured in a straight line from the radio, loudspeaker, motor, horn, or other noise source.” The continuous noise is in violation of the ordinance if it exceeds 60 decibels during the day (between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.) in a residential zone.
The discussion on background checks was prompted by renewed complaints from small short-term rental operators who found the city’s requirement that they conduct their own checks too burdensome. “Little properties like mine, I don’t profit online as it is, so I can’t afford to do background checks on everyone,” a B-Section operator told the council. “That would also eliminate the same-day rentals, that would eliminate 24-hour rentals, because we wouldn’t have time to do background checks. So we would have to say no to those reservations, which is the primary of my business.” She also made a distinction between in-county or in-city operators like her and operators who are out of the county, and who do not address complaints as immediately as she would.
Kathy Davidson, an Airbnb operator, owns a six-bedroom house and rents out five while living in the house. “Airbnb allows us the privilege of being able to be able to pay our bills and pay our mortgage payment to be able to live in our house. We’re grateful for that,” she said. “We take care of our lawn, we do everything that we’re supposed to do.” That also means she can fit 10 cars in front of her house. But some of the city’s regulations would diminish her ability to book renters, she said, including the background check requirement. “We happen to be the little people that are there. You know, we just hired a president that wants to deregulate, and yet we’re talking about regulating more and more for us little people,” Davidson said. Her husband spoke in similar terms.
Members of the Canal Community Coalition, formed chiefly in Palm Coast’s C-Section to press for a city ordinance regulating short-term rentals, addressed the council from the perspective of residents who don’t own or operate short-term rentals, but who endure them in their midst. Some cast doubt on whether companies like Airbnb do comprehensive background checks on their customers. They spoke of noise problems. They wondered how the city would handle repeat violations.
Council member Ty Miller was not opposed to unburdening local operators from the responsibility of background checks, if there’s certainty that a check is being done somewhere along the line. Pontieri, a previous Airbnb operator, vouched for that company’s background check system as “pretty robust.” Absent a local background check, Pontieri and Miller proposed that the operator could sign an affidavit certifying that the renters are properly backgrounded. So the council agreed to redraft the language to reflect that.
Barbara Grossman, the city’s code enforcement manager, also clarified that while code enforcement warnings may end up in the hands of a renter who will be out of town within days, the warnings are ultimately the responsibility of the homeowner-operator, and they can accumulate from renter to renter, if problem persist. If there are recurring problems, “then, of course, when we go to look at their renewal for their short term registration, that could be grounds for revoking,” Grossman said.
For all that, the city’s work may come to nothing if, as expected, lawmakers once again consider deregulating short-term rentals when the legislative session begins in march, as they have attempted to every year since 2014. Every year’s proposal has had one thing in common: sharply diminishing the authority of local governments to regulate the industry. Lawmakers have come close, but have failed every year. The last attempt fell to a veto by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
That attempt had carved out Flagler County as an exception. It would have enabled the county to maintain its local regulations. That was thanks to Paul Renner, then the speaker of the house, and Flagler County’s representative. Renner is gone. Any legislation proposed next year will not likely have such a carve-out, and may well pass. If so, Palm Coast’s ordinance may be nullified within weeks of going in effect.
