Delta City Council voted to table proposed changes to city ordinances regarding short-term rentals at hotels, motels, RV parks and bed and breakfast establishments.
The city’s planning and zoning body had given a negative recommendation for a proposal that would have limited the amount of space commercial rental entities could dedicate to long-term occupancy.
The proposal was modeled after a solution adopted in Richfield after that city saw its hotels mostly occupied not by visitors and tourists but by people in need of long-term housing. A severe housing shortage is creating similar problems across the state.
Delta council members debated about whether to adopt rules forcing local hotels, motels and RV parks to keep at least 75 percent of their capacity available to short-term occupants.
“The thought was if those hotel rooms, those RV spots, those bed and breakfast rooms are being occupied for longer terms, we’re losing out on opportunities to collect that transient room tax (TRT) because they (those spaces) are no longer available,” said Nick Killpack, a council member and liaison to the city’s planning board.
Killpack said he was initially in favor of adopting the ordinance change to preserve the city’s share of TRT funds and also to preserve the city’s zoning when it comes to designating commercial and residential zones.
“Having people basically live there as permanent residences, you are betraying the zoning that that particular parcel of land has been approved for,” he said of long-term hotel occupants. “The same thing can be applied to an RV park. An RV park should be a shorter term thing, where if it’s a long-term stay, where someone is going to have their residence, that’s a mobile home park. There are zoning differences there.”
Despite the concerns, however, most officials agreed Delta and much of Millard County is facing special circumstance, mainly the anticipated arrival of hundreds of construction workers due to the transition project underway at the Intermountain Power Plant.
Council member Kiley Chase said he could understand the rationale for changing the city’s ordinance, but not with the situation looming with the amount of people likely to descend upon the city.
“The difficulty with this ordinance is I think you have a clear short term and a long term. Long term is this what we want? I could see this being something that we could vote for. But we have to think of the short term right now,” he said. “We are going to have so many people coming to this area who need a place to stay. Let’s not kid ourselves. With some of the things we’ve done over the last year or so, we’ve limited that in people being able to provide spaces for these people while they are here.”
Chase said people will start pitching tents “in the weeds” instead of paying “$7 a gallon” to drive home every night after work.
“We have to have a place to put them temporarily,” he said.
Kevin Morris, a county tourism official, told council members he had visited most of the county’s hotels and managers there had all agreed that long-term residents would be forced to move rooms at least every 30 days anyway, preserving the county’s ability to collect TRT funds.“They do that so they can get them out,” Morris said. “Right now they are not allowing that in the first place.”
He said for maintenance reasons local hotels move occupants anyway. He also said for legal reasons the hotels don’t like to allow residents to spend more than 30 days in one room.
He said RV parks are a different matter, since it was impractical to ask long-term occupants at those facilities to move every month. Instead he said the county will recoup any lost TRT funds from IPP once the transition is finished. Morris said the county will be monitoring how much TRT is being lost to long-term stays.
“What else are we going to do? Or else you are going to have them squatting all over the West Desert, everywhere. And that’s going to be bad a bad thing for the community,” Morris said.
The county collects about $200,000 annually from hotel and short-term rental occupancy. That figure is expected to increase dramatically with he influx of construction workers. Normally, local hotels only average about a 40 percent occupancy rate.
Charlie Edwards, owner of Antelope RV Park in Delta, said his operation has a computer set up to track long and short-term occupants. He said any information the county needs, he will provide it for his business.
“We charge our short term stays TRT, which we pay quarterly. Long term we will give whoever we need to give those totals to,” he said.
After considerable discussion, city council members agreed to table the proposal, effectively killing it in favor of the status quo.
“I really feel that we have a special circumstance right here,” said council member Betty Jo Western.