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Home My Public Portal AboutPublic Comment Jared Johnson Darrah Johnston From: Town of Truckee, CA <webmaster@townoftruckee.com> Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2020 3:32 PM To: Truckee; Hilary Hobbs Subject: *NEW SUBMISSION* Public Comment Form for Short-Term Vacation Rental Ordinance and Permit Program Public Comment Form for Short-Term Vacation Rental Ordinance and Permit Program Submission#: 530508 IP Address: 75.111.81.55 Submission Date: 09/08/2020 3:31 Survey Time: 15 minutes, 10 seconds You have a new online form submission. Note: all answers displaying"*****" are marked as sensitive and must be viewed after your login. Name jaredjohnson Email jjtruckee@gmail.com Phone (optional) 4159874302 Public Comment Thanks for taking the time to read my comments, see my attachment. lf your comment exceeds 2000 characters, please use the attachment function below to attach your comment in a separate document. Attachment Public Comment A small.pdf Please ensure that you enter your email address in the box below and click the SUBMIT button to receive a copy of your submitted responses for Public Comment. Thank you, Town of Truckee This is an automated message generated by the Vision Content Management SystemTM.Please do not reply directly to this email. 1 Truckee Town Council, Our elected officials spend several million each year in promoting and bringing tourists to our communities and these tourists generates around 1 billion each year in total revenue for the area. Unfortunately, our elected officials have left us high and dry when it comes to: 1) cleaning up after these tourists 2) making sure these tourists obey the laws while they are here 3) Planning a community that is capable of safely handling anywhere close to the numbers of tourists coming here Town Council need to recognize that overwhelmingly our community does not want anywhere close to this number of tourists here. The traffic gridlock,trash, health and environmental danger and negative impacts on quality of life that goes with this number of tourists is something we can all agree we don't enjoy or want here. Yet the Truckee Tahoe area goes on attracting, maintaining and even increasing a level of tourism that is grossly unhealthy and also dangerous to our community. Beautiful natural areas are being trashed beyond belief with graffiti and litter, damage to sensitive environmental areas due to illegal camping and illegal fires is occurring daily. Our threat of tourists setting forest fires exactly like the one currently burning at Shaver Lake is extreme. During the heightened risk of Covid when our community actually put out a statement asking people to not come here we ended up with greater numbers of people in the basin than we have ever seen. Police are also woefully short staffed, underfunded and are far from being able to make sure that this large number of tourists obey our states laws. Graffiti and litter is everywhere, illegal fires are almost a daily occurrence, crimes are up, calls to police are up. The Truckee Police Captain recently acknowledged this in an email stating they have 2-3 people assigned to 34 square miles responding to 100 calls per day and that this year has seen a 30-40% increase in these calls. The police captain, has asked the community to help make citizens arrests of people littering and graffitiing but is this really fair to our citizens? Is this really what you want as a result of this over tourism and gross misallocation of resources,the Truckee PD telling us that they don't have the man power to enforce our states laws and could use private citizens help to enforce the law? The Town Council needs to act now to reduce this gross amount of over tourism. A great first step towards this is reducing the huge increase in short term rentals that have gone on!!! In the Town of Truckee in just 6 years from 2012-2108 the number of registered STR's increased by 81%, from 951 to 1,720,that's huge! Truckee hasn't published the number of registered STR's in 2020 but Tahoe Donner updated it's short term rental rules in 2019 and in just 1 year had over 900 new STR's register in Tahoe Donner. In the last year Tahoe Donner registered as many STR's as there were registered in the entire town of Truckee in 2012!!!!! (here is the link to that https://www.tahoedonner.com/short-term-rental-registration-where-we-are-today/This massive increase in STIR numbers is going on all around Tahoe like it is around Truckee and it's having an enormous negative impact to the area in huge amounts of litter, graffiti, traffic gridlock ect. Does Town Council know that 88% of the short-term rentals here in our area are owned by people who live outside our area? I'm sure you do because its in White Paper report on short term rentals for our area. The money coming in from these rentals is not even benefiting our community, it's benefiting people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. A fantastic town to look at that has had great success in banning short term rentals to the benefit of the entire community is Jackson Hole Wyoming. Homeowners outside designated lodging areas cannot rent their homes less than 30 days per time. Do you know what has happened to Jackson Hole since it's implemented this ban? It has thrived and here's why: 1) This puts the town is in control of the number of visitors that come, not investors nobody knows living hundreds of miles away. 2) Putting the town in control of the number of visitors that come in allows Jackson Hole to maintain the safety of it's citizens when a public health threat like Covid comes up. You saw what happened when North Tahoe asked people to stay away this summer to reduce the risk of Covid, more people actually ended up coming here than ever before because Truckee is not in control of who is coming here, second homeowners are. Putting the town in control of the number of visitors would also allow it to better manage safety during high fire danger events as well. 3) The local business love it. Local lodging business are always full and don't have to charge low rates to compete with homeowners who can cut corners and are completely unregulated as to how they operate, have to clean or keep conditions safe. 4) A serious health risk for the community is mitigated which is uncontrolled lodging, as there is really no way to regulate how clean a short-term rental is kept or how many people are actually staying there. This can poise a huge health risk to the community especially during disease outbreaks. 5) Local's love it because it keeps number of visitors at a constantly healthy level. Not allowing short term rentals that are all packed with 10-20 people on busy weekends keeps the area from seeing the gross over tourism days we commonly see here in Tahoe when traffic comes to a standstill and conditions become un livable and dangerous. 6) The town of Jackson can now manage its trash much more effectively. The random days where all the short-term rental visitors fill up the bear bins and then leave 5 additional trash bags for the bears to get into and which the town can't collect are gone. Fewer bears need to be put down and trash can be easily managed. 7) No more having to deal with your short-term rental neighbor creating parking problems, playing music and partying all night, speeding through your neighborhoods because they don't care about the people living there and the million other complaints stemming from short term rentals. 8) Elected officials love it because the people living in their communities are happy and the business owners in the community are happy. 9) The town of Jackson Hole brings in more in revenue after banning short term rentals. With less total rentals the town is able to charge more money per rental and is also able to make more in tax fees on each of these rentals. 10) By the Town of Jackson Hole making more money off the tourists coming to stay it has the budget it needs to pick up trash, control graffiti and make sure that visitors there obey the law. Have you been to Jackson Hole? It's beautiful, streets are clean and free of litter, it's citizens don't have to hold weekly cleanup rallies,there's no graffiti. If you haven't been you should go so you could see how it can be done. It was actually incredibly easy for them to do as well.. This Town Council needs to decide what is important to you. If the most important thing to you is a very small number of people living hundreds or thousands of miles away who have and rent out second homes here than you will of course allow the short term rentals to go on like they are. If what is important to you is our community well-being, our safety, our environment and our quality of life here than you will vote to seriously regulate or completely ban short term rentals. This would be an amazing thing you could do for your community and your community would thank you for generations to come. Cheers, Jared Johnson 15 year local with wife and Daughter just starting kindergarten in Truckee. Owner of Outerlands Design Inc.