The Paso Robles short-term rental complaint hotline has a new phone number to improve addressing complaints about the city’s noisy, temporary neighbors.
City Assistant Planner Lori Wilson said the change came after five years of issues with the city’s old hotline, first established under its Short-Term Rental Ordinance in 2019.
“We’ve been operating with a third-party company, and it was really largely an automated system. And so, you know, that just led to a lot of glitches,” she said.
According to the city’s website, there are 418 permitted short-term rental locations throughout Paso Robles, and permits are currently at capacity. Under the Short-Term Rental Ordinance, the number of permits are capped and rental owners are required to provide renters with a “good neighbor brochure” on visitor best practices, including parking etiquette, noise, and occupancy limits.
If visitors break these practices, perturbed neighbors can call the hotline and even ask police to intervene if necessary.
Wilson said the new hotline’s improvements include talking to an actual person in Paso Robles, rather than being processed through an often-automated system of non-local agents.
“They’re in Paso Robles so they’re familiar with the town and familiar with the ordinance, and you get a live person when you call,” she said. “Then a live person also is calling and relaying the message to the owner of the short-term rental permit. So, we just suspect that alone is going to make it so much more user friendly.”
The new company will also cost about $1,900 less per year.
According to Wilson, the old system would often cut off addresses that were left in voicemails, leaving agents unable to determine the location.
“They would miss all the street names and say there was no permit associated with it. Therefore, there’s no call to an owner,” she said. “It did work some other times, but, with these types of situations where you have neighbors trying to sleep and they’re calling in a noise complaint at midnight, it’s pretty frustrating for them to not have it work.”
However, Wilson said the hotline hasn’t been used as much as they expected since it started in 2019.
“A lot of the calls, they’ll amp up during the summertime. I want to say, you know, during the winter months, it’s maybe just a few calls a month into the hotline. During the summer it might be more like one or two a week,” she said.
Wilson also said there are specific permitted short-term rentals that cause more trouble than others, like when four properties with pools generated almost 70 percent of the 84 calls made to the hotline in 2019, according to previous New Times reporting.
“And then those [complaints] will go away, and then you’ll have another house that pops up with that kind of problem for a little bit,” Wilson said. “So not as active as we were thinking it was going to be, and they tend to be noise complaints and parking complaints. Those are the two big ones.”
According to the ordinance, once owners are notified of a good neighbor violation, they have 30 minutes to get to the property, address the problem, and report back to the city.
“And if they don’t, they’re subject to getting a violation on their permit—a strike. And you can have three strikes within 12 months and then potentially have your permit revoked,” Wilson said.
Wilson said the city hopes the new hotline will provide better customer service for everyone involved.
“We just really weren’t happy with the level of customer service we were getting from that company, and we were frustrated with the public having to deal with it too,” she said. “So we were really happy we could find this local company to go with.”
Complaints can be reported to the new short-term rental hotline number at (805) 227-7224. Δ
This article appears in Holiday Guide 2024.
