 All right. Is everybody here? We're waiting on board member pace. Okay. But we do have a quorum. Okay, let me. I have a cell phone. I have not started. Okay. I will just wait one second. Tony couldn't find his email. With a link. We'll give him a minute. Okay. I can try to resend it to him. You know what? We just sent it. Okay. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Any sign of him showing up or. No, still waiting. Okay. I have a cell. I have a cell phone. I can try to resend it to him. I can try to resend it to him. I can try to resend it to him in a minute. If he doesn't show up. We have a quorum anyway. So we'll get started. Now apologize for. The small delay. I said we go ahead and get started. I don't see him joining the ad. Okay. He might be on the call. Is he on the call? Yes. Okay. All right. I'm going to call the meeting to order. I'm going to call the meeting to order. I'm going to call the meeting to order. I'm going to call the meeting to order. I'm going to call the meeting today in replacement of. A regular schedule meeting, which. Was actually. Scheduled on Thanksgiving. So we will not be here. Therefore. We're calling for the special meeting. So welcome again. I'm going to call the meeting to order and roll call. Thank you all this morning for attending. And I just got a read the little advisory here. So pursuant to government. I'm going to call out the roll call very quickly. So let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of board member rumble. Great. Thank you. All right. So pursuant to government co-section. 54 953 and the recommendations of the, of the health officer of the county of Sonoma that. I'm going to call the meeting to order. Thank you. Senator Rosa tourism business improvement area advisory board members. We'll be participating in this meeting via zoom webinar. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website. And as noted on the agenda. Many. Can you please review how the public may comment? Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much. You can do so by selecting the raise hand icon at the bottom of the zoom screen. If you're calling in, please press star nine. And that will raise your hand. Thank you. All right. So, um, we know that, um, member rumble is absent by everybody else is here. So welcome again. And now we're going to move on to item two schedule items. Um, two point one, which, um, is a presentation by senior planner. Sherry meets on short-term rentals on the short-term rental ordinance. And she's going to be providing us with an update. Hello, chair Rivera and members of the SRTBIA advisory board. I'm Sherry meet senior planner. I'm joined today. Excuse me. I'm going to be here to talk about the short-term rentals ordinance potential amendments that we will be bringing forward. Next slide, please. As some of you probably know, prior to October, 2021, short-term rentals were only required to register for transient occupancy tax and business improvement area assessments. There were no regulations specific to short-term rentals. They were considered an extension of a residential use. Um, and not having any regulations, there were, um, some concerns about safety and, um, Other types of things. So it ended up becoming more of a, of a concern of the city. So staff brought the, um, discussion about short-term rentals to the economic development subcommittee in August and September of last year. And they suggested that we, um, draft a short-term rental ordinance. We started, even though it was going to be an urgency ordinance, we started doing as much community engagement as we could in as quick a time as possible. That included a webpage, creating a webpage, um, a public survey, which was, uh, promoted via social media, the city connections newsletter. And we had a industry focused type of workshop. There were also articles about the, uh, project in the press Democrat. So we ended up bringing an urgency ordinance to city council in October of 2021 that established the regulations. But after that time, we determined, well, there's still a few things that were not perfectly clear within the ordinance. And so we went back to the economic development subcommittee in May. And they suggested we correct a, or bring an urgency ordinance to back to city council in August, which would clarify some of the code enforcement questions that were, we received, we realized after the fact. So we did that. And then we also, um, imposed a maximum of non-hosted short-term rentals, which have proven to be the generation of most of the code enforcement type of complaints and nuisance behaviors. So we capped them at 198, which was the number of short-term rental permits that had been issued for non-hosted short-term rentals. And then we added in all that were currently in the queue. Next slide, please. So what is a short-term rental? A short-term rental is using a dwelling unit or any portion of, for less than 30 calendar days for usually considered, they're also called vacation rentals and transient uses. A hosted short-term rental is where the host lives and sleeps in the dwelling unit or lives and sleeps in another legal dwelling unit on the same parcel throughout the short-term rental period. So they are only allowed in the properties primary residents, because we're assuming they will be there during a short-term rental periods. Non-hosted short-term rentals are where the host does not live and sleep in the dwelling unit throughout the short-term rental period. Next slide, please. So the current regulations, the ordinance that was adopted in October of 2021 established a permit requirement. The city developed a new permit, a short-term rental permit, which was designed based, cost was based on a standard temporary use permit. We established through the amendments, as I mentioned, a cap on the total of non-hosted short-term rentals allowed citywide. There isn't a 1,000 foot separation for new non-hosted short-term rentals, which are those that did not apply within a certain period of time after ordinance adoption. Overnight guests are capped at two per bedroom with a maximum of 10, just regardless of the size of the house. You could have a 10-bedroom house, but you would still have a maximum of 10 overnight guests. And then daytime guest allowance is an additional one-half the number of overnight guests. Parking requirements, we require one space per bedroom. These have to be on-site and off-street, except for one can be off-street. Quiet hours are between 9 and 8 a.m., and there is no amplified sound allowed at short-term rentals outside. We established some fire and life safety requirements, including posting of evacuation routes, requirement to have a voice over internet provider or phone or a landline, so they could be receiving alerts. Events are prohibited. And when a permit is issued, we notify the neighbors within 600 feet of that issued permit. We do not do any type of notice before the permit is acted upon. Next slide, please. The ordinance also established a code enforcement policy, which you can see here. The goal was to try to cut down on code enforcement being called and the police called. So as it stands currently, there is a number of violations within the first year. The second complaint has to be directed to a 24-7 contact. And then as you can see from the table, there is a penalty, penalties are set up to increase based on the number of violations within the first year. Next slide, please. So what's happening now? Why are we here? We're considering additional amendments to try to refine our ordinance. So we're considering what is working and what isn't working. Next slide, please. And what are we doing to get answers to those questions? Well, we've been doing community engagement. We have a survey out in case you guys haven't seen it. It's available on, we've been promoting it pretty widely. So if you haven't seen it, I'm surprised, but I'll give you the website address at the end of this presentation where you can find it and take the survey. We've been attending pop-ups, which are unannounced, un-scheduled events. When we see another city event, we tend to, you know, jump on and talk about short-term rentals. We also plan to attend, you know, bring these questions out to the public where they are. So supermarkets, soccer events, maybe, just, you know, trying to get a feel from the community that maybe isn't necessarily attending our community meetings or super involved in the issue. We still want to hear from them. We held a community meeting on Monday, which was attended by about 131 people. It was virtually held with breakout rooms where people were able to express their opinions on the two questions. What's working? What's not? What is working? What is not working? We're going to host another one on December 12th. We are reaching out to neighborhood groups, actually have some meetings set up already. And industry-related groups also have some meetings set up. And if you all know of anybody that would want to have a meeting, please reach out to my, information will be on the last slide as well. Please reach out to me or if you have any other ideas of ways we can reach people that have an interest in this particular topic. Next slide, please. So what is a survey asking? The survey asked some demographic questions are, you know, we want to find out our people, the people that answer the questions, are they short-term rental owners? Do they live here? That type of thing. Most of the meat of the, the issues that we've had around short-term rentals have been the non-hosted short-term rental. So we're really trying to refine how those are regulated. Is the permit maximum of 198 enough too much? Should we instill a maximum nights that can be rented for non-hosted short-term rentals per year? Should we limit the number that an individual can own? And should we reevaluate that 1000 foot separation requirement, whether that be an evaluation city-wide or within certain zones of the city? We're looking at the enforcement penalties. And then obviously the survey gives people a chance to just say exactly whatever they would like to about these issues. And as of Wednesday, November 9th, so that's, we're a week old on that, more than 1300 responses had been received. I'm pretty sure now we're almost at 1500. And that survey will remain open through our next community engagement meeting, which is scheduled, as I mentioned, for December 12th. Next slide, please. So next steps, as I mentioned, community engagement ongoing. Economic Development Subcommittee. I plan to bring a program update and let, let that group know where, where we're at, what we've heard from the community in January, 2023. We're hoping to get a draft ordinance before the planning commission in early spring of next year and bring a draft ordinance to the city council in late spring of next year. Next slide, please. So as I mentioned, the survey and lots of other good tools are available at our specific website, which is at srcity.org, forward slash str. And we have an email box designated for short-term rental communications. And that is what is shown on the screen, short-term rentals at srcity.org. My contact information is at the bottom left. I'm Sherry Mead, senior planner. And you can reach me at smeads at srcity.org. And I'm here to hear any feedback, answer any questions and get a sense of if this group has any input. So that ends my presentation. Thank you. Thank you so much, senior planner Mead. It's a pleasure to have you here. And it's a great presentation. Before I ask my questions, I'm going to ask if any other board members have any comments or questions. Again, how was the 198 number of units max? How was that decided? So we, what we did was we had given, been given the feedback that we wanted to put a pause on taking in new applications on non-hosted short-term rentals until we really were able to stand up the program. There have been delays in permit processing. There have been issues related around code enforcement staffing. And so until we could really get a handle on, is this ordinance working? Is this right for us? We wanted to put a pause also directed by the economic development subcommittee to pause intake of applications. And so rather than putting an outright moratorium, what we did is we looked at the number of non-hosted short-term rental permits that had been issued already at that time and how many were already in queue. So the 198 includes everyone that had been issued a non-hosted short-term rental permit already and everybody in the queue with already in process, they had already submitted a non-hosted short-term rental permit application and we were in the process of reviewing it. So we were hopeful that all of those would be approved. And that's where we came up with 198. And as my OCD person, it's really weird to not say 200, but we were directed to go with exactly that. What's in process now? What's been issued? And that's where 198 came out. Thank you. You're welcome. Good question. Anyone else from the board? If I may, I'll go ahead and ask mine. Great presentation again, like I said, and I remember when this all got started. So I really appreciate you taking this on. You've done a fabulous job. And it sounds like you're doing everything, checking all the boxes to definitely provide that important community engagement that's needed. My question had to do with the meeting on Monday, which I unfortunately had to miss, but what was the common theme? What were some of the comments out of all those people that were there? Obviously those that provided feedback, but it sounds like it was a very well attended meeting. So I'm very surprised and I'm glad that so many people turned out for the meeting. It was a very well attended meeting. We were staffed for it. We were prepared with enough staff to have breakout rooms that were no more than, I think mine had 14, but that's because there were a couple of people looking over shoulders. So the number would have actually been 12 that the hostess could see. So I would say that we had a really large turnout of short-term rental owners and operators and the themes as you may expect from that group, they were, most were in agreement that yes, we need regulations. They want them to be thoughtfully crafted with the short-term rental industry in mind. Most, I shouldn't say most, many people were saying that they would like to see the cap raised and link it to the fact that we have a lot of people that live in the city and therefore, you know, is this really the right amount? So I would say those were the common themes from short-term rental owners. They just want to be heard and they were happy to have this opportunity and obviously we'll continue to provide that opportunity for them. And I don't want to sound like it's only one or the other, but the theme often has come across that then there are the neighbors that say, you know, what about my rights? I purchased this house. You know, I don't want to deal with this nuisance transient thing. These are commercial businesses in a residential zone. Very interested in making sure that if we do allow them in residential zones that we have regulations in place and that we enforce those regulations. There was also discussion about how hosted short-term rentals, you know, maybe we're charging too much for the permits. And mind you, this was not a question and answer. So I wasn't able to explain that unfortunately a hosted short-term rental permit application takes just as long and sometimes longer than a non-hosted because what we've seen is that a lot of applications have come in for spaces that were not built with permits. So that requires a lot of research, that type of thing. So it's something that obviously we're going to continue the discussion. The permit cost is based on a cost of service recovery model. So, you know, that's something that we're considering. So I would say those are the most important themes is that the neighbors want the neighborhood to feel like a neighborhood. They're concerned about, you know, effects to housing costs and availability for long-term residents and then short-term rental operators want to be able to, you know, have this opportunity, economic opportunity. Right. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. Do we have any comments from the public? Laney? Apologies, I had to unmute myself. There are no members of the public present. So there are no hands raised. Okay. All right, Sherry. And I think Amy's also on the call. So hello, Amy. I hope you're doing well. And I want to thank you very much. If you have any other questions in the future, feel free to, you're welcome to come and present and give us another update. Otherwise you can reach to some of the board members individually, which to do so for any feedback. And for the members of the board also feel free to reach out to senior planner meets in the event of any questions or other thoughts that may come later. I was just going to say the same thing. Chair Rivera. So thank you. Please reach out to me at smeads at srcity.org. If you would like to for the discussion and thank you for having us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. All right. So moving on. Let's see. Item number three, we have event support applications. And we have one event support application on the agenda today for the 2022 winter blast event. So item 3.1 is a request for winter blast event 2022 taking place place in, in the sofa, which is the acronym for the south of a street, which is over by Julli Park as you know, on December 10th, which is right around the corner. Wow. I didn't know it was coming so soon. The organization committee, or the organizing committee is requesting a total of $10,500 for the overall event costs, including marketing and promotion. They have partnered also with a professional marketing team for the very first time. I think this event is like 18 or 19 years old. But this is the first time they're applying for S or TBI event support. And they have partnered with that marketing firm to promote the event outside the area since it's become very popular. They're anticipated attendance is approximately between, I guess, 3,000 people. They estimate that at least between 15 to 20% will be from out of town. And then Rune Night Potential is about 100 plus. They are disposed on the application. And they have also partnered with the Astro Hotel to alleviate some of those overnight stays. So that's a little bit about the event and the request. Are there any questions from the board about this request? Did we ever come up with how much we have left? Yes. And thank you for bringing that up. Usually Todd brings that up. And this time I am 99.9% prepared. Unfortunately, we do not have Peter on the call, which is unfortunate. And the backup by Charlene is now at Sonoma State University. Therefore, I did some of the calculations and I checked with their CFO. And there is $13,000 left for the event support budget on the side of the chamber. And as you may recall, the city matches that. So we have ballpark figure of something like $26,000 left. But of course our budget is much larger because we have to go into 2023. So that's about how much there's left. And as soon as the New Year kicks in, they'll have a brand new budget, which I think it's favorite. It's usually around $48,000 to $50,000 that they budget, that they allocate for event support. Is that a calendar year? It's a calendar year. And that's, that's reported on the S or TBI annual report. That it's put, it's drafted sometime in July. And then it's approved by our city council in sometime around August or so. I think this year was approved in late August. So money is not spent for this year. It does not roll over. I may miss what you just said. I apologize. So if we don't spend it, where does it go? Unfortunately, you know, I, I'm not a member of this is Santa Rosa. And therefore I will have a difficulty answering that. So I'm not sure where it goes. I think maybe just gets dispersed into other, into the other budget streams. But I know that. Well, when Brian was here, you know, we're pretty good about, you know, exhausting that budget and then starting pretty much with a small. Well, maybe it does roll over. Because I remember. You know, there would be a residual. And then I think that maybe was incorporated in the new budget. But it was usually very, very small. We would usually just deplete the entire budget. Just use it entirely. Until the pandemic came. And then we had to cancel a lot of the events. And then some of those funds. Sat there and then. So anyway. Just to get the ball rolling on this one. If it's been going on for almost 20 years or 19 years, and they want us to fund over a third of it. I would be more comfortable. Designating like 3000. Because it is in demand period. I don't. I mean, I've lived here 20 years and quite frankly, I've never heard of it. I've never heard of it. I've never heard of it. I've never heard of it. I've never heard of it. I mean, I've lived here 20 years and quite frankly, I've never heard of this event. Which maybe I've got my head in the sand. I would feel more comfortable with like 3000 designated for marketing outside of Sonoma County. Yeah, and. Yeah, and it sounds like the total event cost is 28, 500. I think they end up. They bring it's very, it's a very. Very entertaining, entertaining event. They do a parade. It's over by the Julia Park area, like I said, it's in the South Bay A Street, the arts district. And there's food vendors. There's a lot going on during the. The entire time for a PM all the way through like 11 o'clock at night or something. And I think they were, they were the group responsible for doing the regatta. For all the people that needed the dinner. And they were the current equal square and. People put up customs. I've never heard of the leader, but for listening to you. I mean, I, I wouldn't be willing to say 5000. Yeah. And I wish one of the members on the committee would have Along that, Dana's suggestion, just because, again, they've been doing this on their own for a long time, and I think maybe they come to a point where they have exhausted all the resources, and I know there's probably some potential to get more creative, especially if they're going to hire an outside marketing firm to help them. But it does put Senator Osset back on the map. I would be okay with $5,000 out of this. $5,000? Okay. So if we get any rooms out of this, I mean, and then we would know more how to approach it next year, if they, you know, come up again, or brings, you know, like Todd or I, any business. Well, what I was going to say is I'd be okay with $5,000 with the request that they do some tracking to see where the participants are coming from and how many overnight stays are actually generating. Yeah, that's a good point. Okay, so before we make a motion, before a motion is made, are there any members of the public wishing to comment on item 3.1? Lonnie, I understand there's no members of the public present. So, yeah, and we also did not receive any emails or voicemails for the item. Okay, all right. All right, so are we then ready to make a motion on this item to support this event? Do I have a motion to? I'll make a motion for $5,000 with the stipulations that it be used for marketing outside of the Sonoma County and that they initiate tracking to see where the guests are coming from and how many overnight stays are. Okay, all right, do I have a second? I will second it. Okay, down a second. Okay, is there any other discussion about this? All right, seeing that there's none, the motion on the table is to provide $5,000 towards the winter of last event. The recording secretary will now take roll on the vote. Board Member Anderson. Here we go. Board Member Pace. Board Member Renteria. Aye. Chair Rivera. Aye. All right, so this passes with four ayes with the exception of Board Member Rumble, who is absent. Excellent. All right, well, thank you very much. It's great to hear your voices again. And I'd like to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving and I'm looking forward to next year. And some of the new things I will be implementing will keep you in the loop and I'll look forward to just having a conversation with you later about next year and have a great Thanksgiving. Thank you. Thank you as well. Thank you. I'll adjourn the meeting. Thank you.