Close to Home: Vacation rental corporations need to follow local laws

Imagine your kids being woken up at 2 a.m. by a rowdy party of intoxicated revelers, a stranger roaming through your yard, arriving home to find a car in your only parking spot or a steady stream of strangers ringing the buzzer in your apartment at odd hours.

Now imagine this happening again and again – and being facilitated by a multi-billion dollar corporation. That’s the reality for many communities throughout California because online vacation rental businesses - such as Airbnb or VRBO - continue to operate in violation of local laws.

I have always supported the ability for folks to rent their home for short-term vacation rentals, and I believe that the new “sharing economy” has a lot of benefits. But, these online rental businesses are often about one-way sharing: They share all the benefits of a local community’s services, but they share none of the responsibilities that go with them.

When illegal rentals happen, or when legal rentals aren’t paying their fair share of tourist taxes as defined by laws in 431 California cities and 55 counties, it unfairly degrades the quality of life in our communities - depriving the rest of us of the funds we need to maintain safe neighborhoods, smooth streets and clean parks. It also undermines local choice by allowing large multi-billion-dollar corporations to disregard the local laws that the rest of us have to live by.

I’ve introduced a simple bill that would help restore fairness in our communities. All this proposed law does is make online vacation rental businesses follow local laws that have already been adopted by your city council and/or Board of Supervisors. That’s it. No new taxes are being proposed.

Specifically, if a city or county allows listings for vacation rental properties and has a tourist tax, then the bill would require the online vacation rental business to collect the tax as it’s spelled out in the local law.

Currently, homeowners are unfairly required to collect these taxes. This is a burden to local homeowners - many of whom are simply trying to pay their mortgage - and it should be the multibillion-dollar corporation who collects the local tourist tax.

Second, if a city or county has made vacation rentals illegal per local law, it gives those communities a state law they can use to enforce the prohibition with appropriate fines. Those fines increase the longer an online business ignores the law. In most cases, online vacation rental businesses are ignoring the local laws, many of which have been on the books for years.

When I was on the Board of Supervisors in Sonoma County, we worked to create a system that actually increased the number of vacation rentals in our region.

But it was on this local level that I realized we needed neighborhood protections from those corporations who rent out hundreds of thousands of units throughout California. Specifically, we asked Airbnb to help us collect the desperately needed tourist taxes, but not only company officials not assist, they never returned repeated phone calls and a letter from our attorney. We were encouraging the shared economy to thrive, but the sharing was one-sided.

All this bill will do is help local communities ensure that online vacation rental businesses simply obey the law.

The sharing economy is important to the future of our state’s economic well-being, as long as it’s really about sharing, and that means shared responsibility. New ideas can help communities thrive only when everyone plays by the rules that communities decide are best for them. Right now, all they need is a little help.

Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, represents the 2nd District in the state Senate.