“I would be surprised if it gets through the governor’s veto pen,” Lauren Boehmer, one of Palm Coast’s lobbyists from the Southern Group, told the council on Tuesday in reference to a bill all but ending local regulation of vacation rentals. Boehmer was right. Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday, facing pressure to do so, vetoed the measure–the first to clear the Legislature after annual attempts since 2014–saying the proposal would create “bureaucratic red tape” for local officials.
The bill would not have affected Flagler County: Rep. Paul Renner, the Speaker of the House and the county’s representative, had included a grandfather clause leaving the county’s existing regulations intact. Flagler Beach has had just such a clause since 2011.
But the new bill, had DeSantis not vetoed it, would have prevented Palm Coast from enacting stricter vacation-rental regulations just as the city is experiencing a surge of complaints about multiplying rentals from residents. Council members have been hearing complaints at council meetings and by email. (See: “Sprawling Vacation Rentals Becoming a Nuisance to Palm Coast Residents. City’s Answer: ‘Our Hands Are Tied.’”)
The complaints are almost identical to those Flagler County used to hear in 2012 and 2013, before enactment of the 2014 law re-enabling local governments to more strictly regulate short-term rentals. Flagler County had led the fight for that law, which led to a county ordinance other local governments copied. (See: “Flagler Seeks, Flagler Wins: Bill Restoring Vacation-Rental Regulation Authority Passes House and Heads for Scott’s Desk.”)
Now, Palm Coast has another chance to write its own vacation-rental ordinance, or at least craft some city-specific regulations. City Council member Theresa Pontieri said this morning she intends to open the way for just such a proposal, with caution.
“We have to really ensure we’re balancing the property rights interests of property owners, with the interests of preserving our neighborhoods and making sure that neighbors to these Airbnbs, their right to quality of life and to enjoy their own homes is also protected,” Pontieri said. “So we really have to look at that as kind of the primary starting point and then from there, look at regulations that don’t infringe on property rights, but also protect the neighbors interests such as capacity limits for how many people a residence can sleep. For instance, if we have a two-bedroom home, putting a limit on six people that they can advertise as a rental for things like that.”
Flagler County places a limit of 10 occupants for single-family homes, though some rentals that pre-date the 2014 law are grandfathered in, with higher limits. State law–aside from the vetoed bill–prohibits local governments from banning vacation rentals altogether, or the frequency with which rentals are used. But it allows restricting the use of vacation rentals, including occupancy. (See the legislative analysis of the 2014 bill here.)
“Those are regulations that we can look at that can help this issue,” Pontieri said. “I know it’s a prevalent issue in my section in my district, specifically in the C section. So it’s something that I’m really interested in looking at, and making sure that again, we’re balancing property owner rights interests with the interests of quality of life.”
The council has been hearing complaints at every meeting this month, like one by a homeowner worried about a house nearby getting converted into a vacation rental: “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “I know I’m beating the dead horse to death but there’s a house on our streets that is for sale and the whole block is upset about what’s going to happen with that house.” He added: “There’s more and more houses that are being turned into the short term rentals. There’s more advertising for it. Facebook even has pages where they say, turn your home into a rental. You can make $5,000 a week or whatever. So it’s just going to get worse and we need to do something about it.” The $5,000-a-week figure is barely an exaggeration for Palm Coast (a C-Section house is advertising for $431 a night), but not at all one on the barrier island.
Oversight of vacation rentals for years has been a thorny issue for the Legislature, as advertising for properties on platforms such as Airbnb has ballooned.
This year’s bill (SB 280) — a priority of Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples — also was contentious, with the Senate voting 23-16 to approve it and the House passing it in a 60-51 vote in the waning days of the legislative session.
Champions of short-term rentals say they provide extra income for homeowners and boost tourism, while critics complain that noise, trash, and traffic woes from a revolving cast of visitors negatively transform neighborhoods. As of January, there were 652 single-family homes used as vacation rentals in the county, according to the Tax Collector’s quarterly data, 774 condos, town homes or duplexes used to that end, and 45 dwellings only partially used for rentals. Of that total, Palm Coast had 506 vacation-rental properties, Flagler Beach had 198 and unincorporated Flagler County had 809, a majority of those in the Hammock, which had been ground zero of the vacation-rental wars.
DeSantis’ veto drew mixed reactions.
“This is a difficult issue that has property owners on both sides who deserve a voice in the process,” Senate bill sponsor Nick DiCeglie, R-Indian Rocks Beach, said in a text message. “We worked hard to pass legislation through both the Senate and the House that took the concerns of all stakeholders into consideration. While I disagree with the governor’s decision, I understand his concerns.”
Flagler County Attorney Al Hadeed, whose drafting of Flagler County’s 2015 ordinance became a template for other governments, welcomed the veto even though it had no effect on the county.
“The Governor correctly recognized the flaws of this bill which is why the County opposed it vehemently during the process,” he wrote in an early-morning email. “The poison pill planted in the bill was that any regulation enacted by a local government had to be applied equally to all residential properties of the jurisdiction. No local government would do that because of the sheer expense in managing or regulating every single residential structure, whether available for rent or not. Not only would such a system be highly impractical and costly to administer, but it would also be highly offensive to ordinary homeowners. Notably, under the bill occupancy limits could not be legislated or enforced. Occupancy limits are the key in reducing nuisance behavior that disturbs neighborhoods. Before the County passed its standards in 2015, ‘party houses’ were abundant and infringed on ordinary single-family neighborhoods.”
Flagler County’s aim was to ensure that houses used for short term rentals met life safety code requirements. The proposed bill would have left that intact. “But beyond that, the bill did not offer local governments the ability to tailor their standards based on community characteristics,” Hadeed said. “The veto was entirely appropriate, and the Governor has left good direction for the Legislature if it chooses to address the issues again.”
Melbourne Beach Mayor Alison Dennington called DeSantis’ veto “wonderful.”
“It seems like he’s recognizing that there should be some local registration, that we should be allowed to have it, and that this went too far,” Dennington told The News Service of Florida. Dennington suggested DeSantis create a work group to explore the issue.
“I would love it if he would form some kind of task force with some legislators and some local officials and some building officials, like a regional task force, and maybe we could come back and propose better legislation next year. That would make both sides happy on some of these issues,” the mayor said.
The bill would have prevented local governments “from enforcing existing ordinances or passing any new local measure which would exclusively apply to vacation rentals,” DeSantis wrote in a veto message Thursday.
“Under the bill, any such measure must apply to all residential properties. The effect of this provision will prevent virtually all local regulation of vacation rentals even though the vacation rental markets are far from uniform across the various regions of the state,” the governor wrote. “Going forward, I encourage the Florida Legislature and all key stakeholders to work together, with the understanding that vacation rentals should not be approached as a one-size-fits-all issue.”
The bill drew intense opposition from vacation-rental management companies, coastal community leaders and Florida Realtors, an influential real-estate industry group whose members urged DeSantis to nix the measure.
Speaking to the News Service in March, Dennington called short-term rentals “an existential threat” to single-family zoning. “Because having a mini-motel pretending like it’s single-family zoning right in the heart of every single-family-zoned street is not single-family zoning. … It’s a commercial enterprise. Period,” she said.
The News Service of Florida contributed to this article.
