PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles City Council has reversed course from the most restrictive option for short-term rental regulations and approved an ordinance that would cap whole house STRs at 200 citywide.
The 4-3 vote Wednesday night, which came after several amendments and two nights of deliberations, also included a priority system for those currently compliant with location-based zones and a lottery system that will be implemented Aug. 1
“This is a compromise,” Council member Amy Miller said as she made the motion. “I don’t like it. I’m not happy with it, but I also think that you aren’t happy with it.
“I really do feel this is meeting in the middle.”
Miller called her proposal Option C+/B- because it was between Option B, which would have capped STRs at 250 licenses within the city, and Option C, the amendment the council preferred on a 4-3 vote on Feb. 20 that would have limited STRs to 100 licenses.
Council members Brendan Meyer, Drew Schwab and Mayor Kate Dexter supported Miller’s proposal while council members Navarra Carr, Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin and LaTrisha Suggs cast dissenting roll call votes.
Schromen-Wawrin, who was leading the efforts for Option C on Tuesday night, said council members failed to form a compromise.
“I think this is giving away the city to Airbnb,” he said.
As it stands, the cap will be set at 200 licenses or 2 percent of the city’s housing stock, whichever is greater, and it will become effective July 1, when a platform-based licensing program is expected to go live. Enforcement is expected to begin Nov. 1.
There will be no restrictions on location or zones under the new ordinance, a change from the 2017 code that the city had a difficult time enforcing.
There also will be no restrictions on Type I STRs, which refer to a room or other space rented to another party within the owner’s primary residence, even if they are listed separately.
The ordinance incorporates Senate Bill 5334, which would provide local governments an option for affordable housing funding.
Among the other directives, the ordinance will allow fire life-safety inspections to be determined by the Community and Economic Development staff in one- , three- or five-year increments, and a Good Neighbor policy mechanism was put in place for a two-year license revocation for a third violation within a 36-month period.
In addition, only one unit will be allowed per license, with one STR license per person and one license per parcel.
Enforcement details were not provided.
Separate motions were raised throughout Wednesday night that would have dropped the number of licenses from 200 to either 150 or 100 — and Suggs proposed limiting STRs in three residential zones to 25 percent of the total cap — but each failed on 4-3 votes.
“Residential zones are for houses, not for hotels,” Suggs said. “We need to continue to move forward to provide housing stock for our residents who live here.
“Tourism is always going to be here,” she said. “It’s not going to go away because of stipulations on STRs.”
When the council suspended its work Tuesday night, five amendments to Option C had been discussed and approved, but the main motion carried over to Wednesday without a full vote, so the amendments weren’t official.
Miller, who said she was uncomfortable voting on all the amendments Tuesday night because she had received them via email during the meeting and hadn’t had adequate time to review them, came to council with the new plan Wednesday.
She moved to suspend indefinitely the vote on the changes to Option C, which passed on a 4-3 vote, and proposed the compromise solution.
Not everyone was happy.
“We represent the people of Port Angeles,” Carr said. “We don’t represent people in the county and we don’t represent tourists.”
Dexter, who said the council should be considering budget implications such as hiring extra staff as they pass new policy, supported Miller’s compromise because she said it hit some of the high points with which she was concerned.
“My goal has been to stop exponential growth, not to peel everything back,” she said.
Miller took concepts from Tuesday’s amendments and city staff suggestions and wrapped them into one proposal.
“Some of these suggestions that I took another look at made it not just challenging to implement but nearly impossible without a huge commitment of funds that we would prefer to put toward our public safety department,” she said.
She called her concept a collaborative compromise where no one wins and no one loses.
“I feel like it is as simple as we can get and it is a true compromise, and I also say that, as data comes in, we will be making sure we take all that data and document it, and we can reassess as time goes through.”
Suggs, frustrated with the process, made a motion to eliminate all zones throughout the city.
“If we’re going to ignore the zoning code, I don’t see why we should have zones,” she said.
Meyer called it unwise and Miller said “nobody here wants a free-for-all.”
“Those types of comments are what’s creating the us vs. them,” Miller said.
The motion failed 4-3.
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Managing Editor Brian McLean can be reached at 360-417-3531 or by email at brian.mclean@peninsuladailynews.com.
