When I was 9, my father was a probation officer and minister of a small mountain church in Mariposa, near Yosemite. It was as much like the town of Mayberry from the old Andy Griffith show as one could imagine.
One day, my father was in court on a probation matter. He saw a tiny little girl sitting alone and scared in the courtroom. He asked the judge if our family could take her, and with almost no paperwork, I got a little sister, René. She looked like a tiny porcelain doll dressed in a blue corduroy dress with a little bonnet.
René was eight years younger than me. Later, when I was 16, I took her around with me a lot as I was a de facto babysitter. She had a child’s simple way of looking at the world. I found it very sweet that when she found something she wanted at the store or in a magazine, she asked how many bubble gums it was, since one piece of bubble gum cost a penny. A McDonald’s burger was 12 bubble gums in 1961.
Since a judge recently ruled Initiative Measure T unconstitutional, it occurred to me, using my little sister’s bubble gum economics theory, that the taxes lost by the City could be measured in terms of potholes filled. Each of the potholes in our city costs about $ 1,000 to fix. We could fix 1,000 potholes for a million dollars.
Measure T eliminated 1,400 VHRs chasing a huge amount of tourism to other communities. Truckee has seen its TOT tax income rise 275 percent while ours has remained flat with costs way up, leaving us in a dangerous trend. The estimate is that about three million TOT tax dollars have been lost annually by the City of South Lake Tahoe over the last 5 years. That amounts to 15 million plus sales taxes. We could have filled 1,000 potholes and fully paved another 8 miles of our crumbling streets.
I recently posted a list of 40 closed businesses. Others have added to that list for an astonishing 70 that have closed their doors. The chain link fences tell the story. Hundreds of jobs have been lost. Some of those were house cleaners, gardeners, snow plow services, reservationists, painters, restaurant workers, and even trades companies. I talked to one large plumbing company that almost closed and an electrician whose phone stopped ringing as homes didn’t need repairs. One VHR company alone laid off 22 employees.
Our city council now knows that eliminating the 1,400 VHRs did not create a significant number of permanent rentals. They now know that we gifted the North Shore and Truckee with our tourism families. They now know that hundreds of locals lost their jobs and moved away, which also hurt our schools. They now know that the loss of TOT taxes is a dangerous hit to their city budget and our local family budgets. They now know that the ballot measure was unconstitutional.
So, what should our City Council do? They have a sincere desire to provide a balance by giving our permanent residents the quiet enjoyment of their homes while allowing other homeowners the right to temporarily rent out their homes in accordance with the travel trend of staying in homes away from home for vacations.
The obvious answer is to save this summer’s business and bring back lost jobs by ending the temporary moratorium on Tuesday, April 22, or as soon as the staff is ready to accept some applications, especially giving priority to those who lost their permits to Measure T. If that is done for a few hundred per month with inspections and actual strong enforcement, significant penalties, and a three strikes and you’re out policy, then ordinance 1114 will work even better than the very few numbers of complaints clearly showed it did before T was enacted. The council could then, once the real data shows any issues, make any amendments that show they are needed, keeping the changes simple, consistent, predictable, and fair. The decision should be made on facts and proven effective enforcement, not on emotions and old grudges.
Thousands of potholes await the decision.
Here is an article about Maui dealing with the same issues:
-Duane Wallace, CEO, ACE
South Tahoe Chamber of Commerce
duane_wallace@hotmail.com