Community participates in first of three public VHR workshops in South Lake Tahoe

The City of South Lake Tahoe promised to hire a company to provide a socio-economic study on the impacts of vacation home rentals (VHRs) on the city. Michael Baker Incorporated, a company that has studied the same impacts at Big Bear Lake, Morro Bay, Monterey and Avalon on Catalina Island, was hired to do the job.

Wednesday night, representatives from Michael Baker had stations around a room at the Senior Center to determine what the almost 100 people who were at the meeting thought was important, and not important, of several aspects of both the study and VHRs.

Michael Baker will tabulate these results, combine them with an online survey, results from meetings with stakeholders and the community, and with collected data and create a report that the City will receive in Spring, 2017. Before that, two more public meetings are planned, one in January and the other in March so its not too late to participate and share your feelings about VHRs. The online survey is still available to take, click here.

There have been several heated debates about VHRs in South Lake Tahoe, but those emotional comments were absent during Wednesday's meeting, and instead there was a cooperative atmosphere where the community shared their thoughts in a constructive way.

"I liked this," SLT Mayor Wendy David said of the workshop. "It's more like a community gathering. It is so important to meet as a community."

The Michael Baker staff met earlier in the day for discussions with two random groups of representatives from real estate, vacation rental management and residents.

"We'll give the City recommendations based on four to six scenarios they could base their future decisions on, from banning VHRs to no limits on the rental homes," said Amy Sinsheimer, the lead on this project for Michael Baker International.

Sinsheimer said that Morro Bay used their services to help them update their general plan. As a result, their City chose to temporarily limit VHRs to 250 in the community of 10,000 people until the plan can be completed. In the last 2015 survey, Morro Bay had 588,000 overnight guests for the year, a much smaller number than South Lake Tahoe.

There are major differences between the makeup of neighborhoods in tourist towns with those without tourism according to Jessica Hayes of Michael Baker.

"Homes are an investment vehicle in other towns," said Hayes. "The investor buys and it is in his best interest to keep the home occupied to make money. In a tourist town, people purchase because they value the quality of life the town provides and they want to live there."

She also said second home owners have lots of choices when buying that home.

"Non-tourist communities worry about absentee landlords and enforcement of long-term rentals," said Hayes. "They fear the impact of apartments in their neighborhoods."

Hayes also pointed out that towns like Rancho Cordova, Calif., where there are no vacation rentals, are concerned with trash and trash cans in the neighborhoods just as many in South Lake Tahoe are. She said there are a lot of other parallels with tourist and non-tourist communities. Besides the trash there are absentee landlords who don't have a local presence or local interest as well as well-managed properties with local companies.