As Pismo Beach residents for more than 30 years, Kim Mistretta and his wife were in for a shock when they came across a social media post on June 21 announcing the Pismo Beach City Council’s discussion to pass a moratorium on short-term rentals [STRs] that very evening.
Now working as a part-time lawyer, Mistretta started an STR out of his home three years ago to earn extra income, soon after the beach city adopted regulations governing STRs in 2018. Suddenly stumbling across the City Council agenda left him feeling blindsided.
“When you look at the agenda and the staff report, that was 12 or 15 pages [long]. You could tell they had been working on it for months. Certainly nobody told any of the existing short-term rental permit holders about it,” Mistretta said.
The City Council’s agenda packet also included 13 letters from annoyed Pismo Beach residents, ranging from neighbors of an allegedly noncompliant STR-permit holder to Mistretta himself. Most of the letters requested the city to revoke the permit belonging to the owner of a short-term rental at North Silver Shoals Drive. Their main complaints: trash, noise, and cramped parking spaces left behind by the influx of tenants going through the property’s revolving doors.
The June 21 meeting ended with the City Council unanimously approving an interim urgency ordinance to impose a moratorium on issuing STR permits. They will deliberate the terms of stricter enforcement policies in August. Currently, 28 STRs legally operate in Pismo Beach, and the city isn’t accepting applications for new ones. But while the contentious issue split some residents into opposing camps, both aired their frustrations with how city officials handled the situation.
“In reviewing the staff report and correspondence, we are very concerned that staff and the council are being unduly swayed by a very vocal, but tiny, number of persons complaining,” Mistretta wrote in his letter. “Out of the 12 items of correspondence currently of record on this agenda item, all 12 are negative. That is clearly because the law-abiding STR permit holders have had no notice of it, nor any significant opportunity to submit to the council anything positive, in support of our interests.”
At the June 21 meeting, City Manager Jim Lewis mentioned that staff uses a software program that relies on complaint reports to track noncompliance. He encouraged residents to dial the hotline number to lodge them. But one of the residents highlighted a problem with that system.
“When asked to register a complaint, we were given a number from their website. When we were not getting a response to our complaints, they realized the hotline number was not correct, and the city was not receiving our complaints,” the letter read. “I have found it extremely frustrating to give the department information to help them enforce the rules when their messages to the residents have been inconsistent. We were told that the information provided to the city prior to the granting of an application could not be used because it is only considered ‘hearsay.’ After the permit is granted, however, information provided to the city is ‘very valuable information.'”
Members of the public aren’t the only ones concerned. City Councilmember Sheila Blake, too, expressed her frustration during the meeting about what could be done to help the dozens of people living in the North Silver Shoals neighborhood. City Attorney David Fleishman told her that people were welcome to submit evidence of noncompliance to the staff.
A few days after the meeting, the letters that initially revealed the writers’ names were retroactively redacted. Only two—including Mistretta’s—remained unaltered.
“After receiving the correspondence, some of the correspondence that was submitted as part of public comment, we deemed those to be actual code enforcement complaints. We treat those as anonymous,” city Public Information Officer Jorge Garcia told New Times.
Garcia declined to speak about specific cases but said that filed complaints are directed to the city’s code enforcement officer. The officer investigates those complaints to evaluate whether violations have occurred. Considered investigations from that point, the status of the complaints aren’t revealed to members of the public, including to the people who filed them. Residents can lodge concerns at (800) 866-4301.
“Part of the issue that happened is we had a hotline number that was mailed in our notices. That phone number is and has always been accurate. Our website had an old number on it. So, that number was called and there was no way for a member of the public to leave a message on it. We were made aware of it and immediately corrected that,” he said.
Garcia attributed the City Council’s attention on STRs to direction staff received in January. Council members wanted to evaluate the program and the fines attached for violations. The fact that a handful of residents sent in annoyed letters was “purely coincidental,” he said.
According to the existing regulation, initial fines for violation are $750 at a minimum and $1,000 for each subsequent violation. City Council members were concerned that noncompliant permit-holders were readily paying off the fines before breaking the rules again.
Philip Teresi, a neighbor of the complained-about North Silver Shoals short-term rental, also wants to see a penalty hike and better management. He told New Times that the neighbors get the full brunt of the “negative side effects” of having STRs in residential areas.
“The biggest complaint I would have is there is no active manager available to mitigate those problems. The onus is on the neighbors to complain when things get out of hand. If we can’t get ahold of the manager, we’re forced to contact the nonemergency line of the Police Department, which I don’t really like to do. It shouldn’t be their job to have to police this,” Teresi said.
Councilmember Marcia Guthrie echoed Teresi at the June meeting and admitted that an ordinance update was needed because neighbors shouldn’t have to bear the responsibility of noncompliance. City staff is also looking to take inspiration from cities like South Lake Tahoe, San Diego, and Monterey that have mostly limited STRs to nonresidential sectors.
“Short-term rentals really belong in the downtown core, and usually they’re managed by active managers. We have a ton of beach rentals here in Pismo Beach that we get along with fine because they’re actively managed,” Teresi told New Times. “When people try to take their homes and be an absentee owner that’s just trying to monetize their property, that’s when things go bad.” Δ
Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 14-24, 2022.