The lots are small and so are the streets in the neighborhood east of South Ocean Avenue in Cayucos.
It’s hard to maneuver and it’s hard to find places to park, said Vicki Tamoush as she pointed out her window facing St. Mary Avenue. A proposed motel on a property that’s directly in her line of sight is just going to make it worse, she added.
Her neighbors sitting around her coffee table, Harley Dubois and Ann Sturges, agree, which is why they banded together with 20 others to appeal the project’s approval to the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors. It’s too big for the number of parking spaces and would adversely impact their street, they said.
“Cayucos is slowly being eroded,” Dubois said. “The thing that really bothers me is the long-term stuff. … Once it happens, it never goes away.”
A few days later, on April 30, the board concurred, delaying a decision on the appeal and asking the applicant to come back in July with more parking spaces on the property.
The proposed mixed-use motel and caretaker residence has four unitsāthree of which are slated to be extended-stay/short-term rentalsāand seven parking spaces. The county requires two parking spaces per motel guest unit, planner Andy Knighton told the board. He added that the parking lot for the motel provides one more parking space than required.
“Many of the properties and structures on St. Mary Avenue are older,” Knighton said, adding that they don’t conform with current county codes. “The project is not required to address or resolve surrounding nonconforming parking conditions.”
Dan Boridorri, who spoke on behalf of the appellants, said that most motel rooms average between 300 and 400 square feet. The proposed motel’s units are larger than 1,000 square feet with multiple bedrooms.
“The four units in the proposed motel have a unique potential of occupancy of six to eight guests per unit,” Boridorri said. “Let’s look at it in the real world of how many people are going to be staying in that room and how many vehicles it’s going to take to get them there.”
The result would mean that a large number of vehicles would have to park in the residential area, he said.
Developer Uriah Donaldson contended that the occupancy rate per unit would be the same as a motel room with two queen beds and a pull-out sofa. He added that he had gone through multiple iterations of the proposal to get it to comply with county codes, and he said he would also be happy to place an occupancy cap on the number of guests who could stay in each unit.
“Whatever we can do to make this project of value to the city and community of Cayucos, that’s what I want it to be,” he said. “These will be my neighbors.”
But his future neighbors don’t necessarily believe that he will be occupying the caretaker unit with his wife as he said he would, and neither does 2nd District Supervisor Bruce Gibson.
“I have to be honest, I am suspicious of the caretaker unit,” Gibson said. “Frankly sir, your testimony didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.”
In response to questions from 5th District Supervisor Heather Moreno, Donaldson said he would be changing his address to the motel and parking his Toyota Rav4 in the parking lot. She asked whether his wife had a car, and he said she had a Toyota Corolla but likely wouldn’t be driving it.
Moreno added that the configuration of the units made it more likely that people in multiple cars would be meeting for their stays.
“The bed rate may be the same, but it is different when you have separated bedrooms. It just is,” she said.
Fourth District Supervisor Jimmy Paulding said that while the project technically complies with county codes, “they were very clever as well in terms of how to submit a project within the definition of our code.”
“The testimony didn’t quite align with that,” Paulding said.
Gibson said that it sounded like the motel would need nine parking spaces rather than seven and requested that Donaldson come back with something that incorporated that. Cayucos is visitor-serving, and parking is “absolutely jammed,” he said.
“If this is sized correctly and oriented correctly, I think we could make this less of a contentious issue,” Gibson said. Ī
This article appears in Best of SLO County 2025.
Disingenuous headline. The project provides more parking than is required and the appellants are trying to argue that it should provide a parking space for every bed. There are no parking concerns, just neighbors who believe their property rights extend onto the land owned by someone else. The project applicant put a lot of time into making sure the project met County code, yet the Board of Supervisors feels the applicant needs to go above and beyond even though they already have provided more spots than required. If the Board is unhappy with the legal route the applicant took to maximize their project, they should look at County code rather than punishing the property owner.