Approves a text amendment to the Denver Zoning Code to allow short-term rentals as an accessory to a primary residential use, with limitations, where residential uses are currently allowed. (NEIGHBORHOODS AND PLANNING) Approves a text amendment to the Denver Zoning Code to allow short-term rentals as an accessory to a primary residential use, with limitations, where residential uses are currently allowed. IF ORDERED PUBLISHED, A PUBLIC HEARING WILL BE HELD ON THIS ITEM.  REFER TO THE "PENDING" SECTION OF THE FUTURE COUNCIL MEETING AGENDAS FOR THE DATE. The Committee approved filing this bill at its meeting on 4-13-16.
And both that committee and the task force met many times to discuss short term rentals. We also had a staff working group throughout this period composed of representatives from multiple departments, including the Mayor's Office, Community Planning and Development, Excise and Licenses, as well as the City Attorney's Office. And we spoke with registered neighbor neighborhood organizations throughout the process, including AMC and Capitol Hill, United Neighbors. Also this year, the Department of Excise and Licenses hosted four town hall meetings in different quadrants of the city that were very well attended. We had quite a few residents and other stakeholders come to talk to us about short term rentals during those town hall meetings. As you as you know this. Discussion resulted in the current proposals that are before you tonight, which come in in two pieces. There's the first piece is a proposed change to the zoning code to allow short term rentals as an accessory use. The second piece is a companion licensing ordinance that will create a business licensing system for short term rentals. The criteria for adoption of the two pieces is a little bit different, so I'll be talking primarily about the zoning code text amendment component, and then I'll turn it over to Nathan Batchelder to talk about the licensing component of the system. The Zoning Code Text Amendment component began the legislative process with the planning board hearing in March, and its purpose. The purpose of the text amendment is to recognize the growing popularity of short term rentals while still providing protections for neighborhoods, residents, short term rental guests and hosts, operators of traditional lodging accommodations that hotels and bed and breakfasts . It's also intended to support that companion licensing ordinance that I talked about. And the bill, the the tax amendment is sponsored by Councilmember Councilwoman Mary Beth Susman from District five. So just to bring us onto the same page about the status of short term rentals in the city, now they are not allowed in most residential districts. Well, they're not allowed in any districts that are that are purely residential. And that prohibition is enforced by a complaint by neighborhood inspection services at this time. Short term rentals may be allowed in mixed use commercial districts, not called short term rentals. That term doesn't appear anywhere in the zoning code, but as lodging accommodations. So if you're in a district where a hotel is permitted, there is technically the possibility of getting a zone use permit to change the use to lodging accommodations and then getting a business license for lodging accommodations subject to building code and parking requirements. The proposed text amendment allows short term rentals as accessory to a primary residential use, and short term rentals would be permitted as an accessory use with limitations where residential uses are currently allowed throughout the city. And I just want to acknowledge that clearly the demand for short term rentals varies across the city. If you go on any of the hosting platforms and look at the sites, the short term rentals on offer are concentrated towards the center of Denver. Not surprisingly, however, there are short term rentals all over the city, just fewer numbers away from the center. And, you know, as we've had this discussion about short term rentals, I think we haven't really seen why short term rentals, the potential benefits and impacts would be substantially different from one single family neighborhood to another single family neighborhood. Say, regardless of whether there are lots of short term rentals there now or very few short term rentals, they're now based on the market. So that's why we're proposing this citywide approach, which is quite consistent with what all of our peer cities have done. No zoning permit would be required to conduct short term rentals. That's because we've talked to quite a few other cities. Nathan has talked to a lot of cities about their experience with regulation of short term rentals, and it's very clear that they feel that the streamline approach is the way to get a higher level of compliance. And so in this proposed approach, we place more short term, more requirements, most requirements for short term rentals in the business licensing component of the approach. So you're required to get a business license, which is why we decided that a requirement to get a zoning permit would be duplicative. And so I will acknowledge that most other home based businesses that are permitted now, if you have a home beauty parlor or a or a home office, are classified as home occupations, which is a category of home based business, and those do require a zoning permit. However, they don't require a business license. And so we actually are are making a lot of the same requirements. We're just doing it on the business license side where we think we can have better enforcement. And so the proposed text amendment would permit short term rentals that are conducted by the person using the dwelling unit as their primary place of residence. And that could be the owner or the renter living there. And I just want to emphasize that rental of a whole house or dwelling unit is permitted. The resident could be offsite, fulfilling National Guard duty. They could be on vacation. And so this isn't necessarily sharing a room with the person that lives there. We would expect that there always will be a number of whole houses available to host short term rentals while the owners are are away. They would be permitted in a primary structure or an attached or detached accessory dwelling unit. However, they could not be you couldn't have multiple guests at one time on different contracts. Unlike a hotel which rents rooms out to different parties, this would be just one party at a time, whether they were staying in the detached accessory structure or the primary structure. But both of those would be permitted, but only one set of guests, and it also would not include rental for special events such as weddings or parties. And of course, the inverse of the primary resident requirement is that if you don't live there, you would not be able to conduct a short term rental in the dwelling unit. That requirement, the primary residence requirement, is intended to help preserve the fabric of residential neighborhoods. So in this framework, the primary use remains residential, long term residential living, with short term rentals permitted as accessory to that primary residential use. And that recognizes decades of experience that that we have in the city of Denver with home based businesses. And that indicates that there are fewer concerns when there's a primary resident present. Denver's current regulations allow those home occupations, home based businesses, as I mentioned before. And those are businesses that are conducted by the person that lives there. That beauty salon is a beauty salon that you, as the resident are running. You're not renting out your house to to be a beauty salon that somebody else is running. And this approach, this primary resident approach, also allows us to continue evaluation of potential impacts on housing stock. There are a lot of questions, you know, what does this mean for affordability and the change of. Units from long term rentals, say, to short term rental. And we don't know for sure. And some of the studies that have been done in other cities are not completely conclusive. But with this approach, we're taking a first step towards regulation of short term rentals. That leaves future options open. If we opened everything up now and then tried to go back, that would be more difficult, I think, than taking a cautious approach now and then. Revisiting through the advisory committee that Nathan will tell you about whether additional flexibility is appropriate in some areas. We've received a lot of public comment through letters and emails as well as at those town hall meetings. I'll just summarize a little bit of what we've heard through this through 3:00 today. So we've received 224 letters and emails. And of those 224 letters, about 32% specifically mentioned something about supporting that primary residence requirement. About 46% specifically mentioned opposition to that primary residence requirement. And then the nearly half of the emails and letters that we've received have expressed some sort of support for short term rentals in general as well, saying that they offer benefits to two residents and two neighborhoods potentially. However, about 20% have expressed opposition to short term rentals in general. And those numbers that have Asterix next to them, that's just indicating that in some cases we received a bunch of emails that were kind of on a forwarded email template in those categories. And the position statements that we've received from registered neighborhood organizations and other organizations were included in those numbers I showed you on the previous slide. But just to dial in a little bit more to what we've heard from them, nearly all of them have expressed support for the text amendment as drafted. And those letters that we've received from organizations that didn't specifically say we support the text amendment have drafted. As drafted, they said we support the primary residence requirement. Specifically, there is one letter which we received from an organization, the Vacation Rental Managers Association, that does express opposition to the primary resident requirement and support for short term rentals in general. And there were a few RINO's, the Pinehurst Nature Way, University Park and West Wash Park. They do say that they really have concerns about short term rentals and aren't sure whether they should be allowed, but indicate that if they are going to be allowed, it's very important that that primary resident component be left in the requirements. So I'll tell you about. The review criteria for the text amendment, and that is consistency with adopted plans, uniformity of district regulations. And we need to find that the text amendment furthers the public health, safety and welfare of the city. Looking at that first category, there are two citywide adopted plans that are applicable here. The first is Comprehensive Plan 2000. It talks about a city of neighborhoods, and that includes modifying land use regulations for flexibility to accommodate changing demographics and lifestyles. It's a comprehensive plan. 2000 does anticipate that we will need to look at the zoning code and make revisions to accommodate changing trends and lifestyles. It also talks about allowing or encouraging a diverse mix of things, including home based businesses. And it talks about promoting a zoning ordinance that's flexible and accommodating of current and future land use needs, such as home based businesses and accessory flats. And it talks about preserving and modernize Denver, modernizing Denver's existing housing stock and established neighborhoods, as well as making an economic objective that we should promote quality accommodations for visitors. So staff feels that the proposed text amendment is consistent with the objectives of comprehensive plan 2000. Blueprint Denver talks about maintaining the character of areas of stability while accommodating some level of redevelopment. And it talks about new and revitalized neighborhoods centers, which is something that's been part of the discussion how short term rental gas may contribute to the vitality of neighborhood centers by shopping and entertaining themselves locally. It makes recommendations that zoning concentrate more on building design than on use. And it specifically says that under unenforceable standards should not be included in zoning. And that's something that's really been on our minds throughout the process. Let's not include requirements that we really don't think we can enforce. So staff feels that the proposed text amendment is consistent with Blueprint Denver goals and recommendations. We also find that the proposed text amendment includes reasonable neighborhood protections that will further the public health, safety and welfare, and that it applies uniformly to all zone districts where residential uses are permitted, which promotes uniformity of district regulations. Planning Board on March 16, voted 7 to 2 to recommend approval of the Text Amendment before you tonight, finding that all applicable review criteria have been met. I'll note that the two no votes from Planning Board both express support for short term rentals and in general, one of the no votes sought more flexibility for non primary resident rentals. The other no vote. They expressed interest in having a more nuanced or geography based approach that treated some parts of the city differently than others. So consistent with planning boards. Recommendation staff recommends that Denver's zoning code text amendment number eight be approved, finding that the applicable review criteria have been met. So I'll now turn it over to Nathan Batchelder to tell you about the licensing component. Good evening, council president, members of Council Nathan Batchelder, a legislative analyst with Excise and Licenses. And I'm here tonight to walk you through the very basic proposals of the short term rental business license. So when we look at the general short term and all licensing requirements, first, the licensee has to be a legal resident of the United States that's applicable to all of our licenses. If the licensee is not a property owner, the licensee must have the permission from the landlord or the property owner to operate the short term rental. The short term rental unit must be the licensee's primary residence or what we're referring to an ordinance is that place of normal return, and that can be demonstrated by the proof of voters registration, driver's license, tax document, utility bills or any other relevant documentation that's determined sufficient by the director of excise and licenses. The short term rental has to be located in the zone district that allows residential use and the licensee must possess a valid Denver Lodgers tax and any other applicable tax account numbers, including occupational privilege tax. If you go to the additional licensing rules and regulations, the licensee has to provide the unit address and personal contact information to the department when they apply. Also, the licensee has to provide what we're calling a guest rental packet with all the applicable city rules and regulations that pertain to the safety information to the guest upon each booking. So that can include no rules and restrictions regarding on street parking. All the city applicable noise regulations, trash collection, schedule, etc.. It'll also include the unit safety information, including the egress and the ingress rounds, any fire evacuations or any other safety features. We'll also require the licensee to have a local emergency contact information in those cases of emergencies. Licensee has to maintain general liability insurance to protect against property damage and bodily injury. The licensee will have to maintain an operable smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector and fire extinguisher in the unit at all times. And importantly, the licensee has to list the units short term terminal license number on any online print or other advertisements. And what's exciting about this proposal is that as we watch and monitor other municipalities adopting regulations, we we actually see that Denver might be the first in the nation to offer an online short term rental license. And as Ed mentioned before, making sure we have that easy, streamlined application process is paramount to us so that we can gain as high rate of compliance as possible. Right here is just the basic steps where people will certify under penalty of perjury online that they meet the requirements. Once they do certify that they meet the requirements, put in their tax license ID number and pay the $25 application fee, their license, as well as their corresponding license number will be sent to them essentially where they can print that license out and then have their license number to start advertising their units. And when you talk about the sorts of moral enforcement, it's important to understand the current enforcement of short term rentals as it exists in the current zoning code. So the current zoning code is oftentimes been typically burdensome and onerous for neighborhood inspection services inspectors to actually demonstrate or adjust or prove that someone is offering a short term rental license with the corresponding tax amendment. We'll still have regulations and rules that nice inspectors will still be able to enforce. But we're adding an additional level of business licensing requirements, and these business licensing requirements will be enforced by the new short term rental division within Excise and Licenses, which is a dedicated team of inspectors within our department that will have both a complaint based enforcement operation and also be proactive with compliance monitoring among the licensees. So you can see here our various enforcement tools under the business licensing rule is something that we're used to any short term and all licensee or any responsible party can be subject to these various licensing tools for compliance and suspension and show cause hearings. For example, we could issue a simple notice to comply for operating without a license. We can issue a license suspension for not having a rental package or having insurance. We can have a general violation or essentially a fine for up to $999 per incidents of advertising without a license number. And we can also trigger, show cause hearings for that license revocation. If we determine that you violated that primary residency requirement. So we feel that the in addition to the zoning code regulations that are being adjusted and modified for short term rentals, we'll have this new layer of business in licensing standards that licensees will now have to live up to once their license with the department. And continue with the short term rental enforcement. We really envision the short term rental division partnering with our other city agencies to not only enforce the requirements of the ordinance, but make sure that the short term rental division is aware of any sort of common neighborhood complaints that might come from short term rentals. So for example, the short term rental division, which lives out of excise and licenses, we can receive the complaints and investigate about licensed and unlicensed short term rentals. We can monitor and track advertisements for licensed and unlicensed short term rentals and make sure that someone's license number is in their advertisement. We can inspect and investigate any other violations of the requirements, including insurance, rental packages, safety features, etc.. And then our department will be able to issue those general violations. Suspensions in show cause hearings on the actual license itself. And we envision partnering with our city agencies, including the APD, Neighborhood Inspection Services, 311 Environmental Health. So what we'll be able to do is track the what we're calling the common complaints that come in on not only just short term rental properties, but but but of all the licenses in our in our system as well. So we'll be able to know if there is a disturbing the peace call on a particular licensee. Any complaints about trash or violating really any sort of local ordinance? Excise and licenses will then be able to take action on that license. What's also great about our proposal here is that we have a we're proposing a six month soft enforcement window. And the reason behind this is that we want to make sure people are aware of our short term rental license and what it what it means to come in where they need to get licensed through which department. And this is really to encourage as high rate of compliance and educate the House as much as possible on what they need to do to become a responsible host. Some of our soft enforcement tools are really intended to educate hosts about our new tools, rules and requirements. We can send reminder notices to host and property owners throughout this six month period to make sure they're aware of our licensing requirements and where they can come in and get licensed. We're also anticipating what we're calling now the host with the most marketing and education campaign. We're a separate marketing and advertising launch will come from excise and licenses to encourage hosts to get licenses and show them where they can get their licenses. We'll also use the short term rental advisory committee and the short term rental, you know, distribution list and other resources we have available to make sure that we spread the word and make sure people get licensed after the December 31st. 26th date is when that strict enforcement of the short term rental ordinance would begin. And finally, we've talked a little bit about the proposed short term rental advisory committee. And the reason for this advisory committee is to know that we want to make sure this license continues to get honed and sharpened. And and it makes sure we have the appropriate tools going forward so we can actually work with the neighbors and with our community partners to research, study and do analysis of the local short term rental industry. We can have this dialog where we analyze our complaints and the violations and the enforcement efforts and the coordination between the two, between the separate departments and the short term rental advisory can also provide recommendations and reports to excise and licenses. And one of the things that we found during our town halls is that there was a lot of sentiment and concern about having a non primary residency option. And I think we understand that and we recognize those concerns. And what we'd like to do is use this short term rental advisory committee to really study the feasibility of what that non primary residency option would be and bring that recommendation back to the city council, have it go through the same community dialog, the same community process that this particular proposal went through. Finally, the short term rental advisory committee can recommend further rules, regulations and other procedures that can be promulgated by the department, including fines, schedules, enforcement procedures and those other administrative operations. Outside of the ordinance, the committee can meet as long as necessary and work in perpetuity as long as the license exists. And in terms of that composition of the short term advisory committee really have a more the merrier philosophy. We want to have a wide range of views and provide a really robust objective of policy discussions within that advisory committee. So potential members can include neighborhood and R.A. representatives, agency representatives, short term rental licensees and hosts, short term rental guests, short term rental industry representatives, hospitality representatives, partnering city agencies, excise and licenses, city council members and their staff. And then outside experts. Economists. Academics. Real estate experts and housing experts. So with that, we conclude our presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. We have 64 speakers signed up for short term rentals. And for those of you that this is your first time to counsel. Get comfortable. The conversations, the comments are broken out. Pro four or neither. And staff chooses the order and we alternate pro for and neutral until one is exhausted. And I'm going to call up the first five speakers. I would ask that you sit in this front pew to expedite the processes and I'll call out each individual name. You can come out and begin your remarks. I will apologize in advance for any names that I mispronounce. First five have. We are Cheri and I, and I'm pleased if we could keep the applause to a minimum. It just simply extends the public hearing. So if we could keep that hold on that that would be really appreciate it. Sherry Wei, Mark Lance, Margie Valdez, Rhonda Beard and Shays Brady. Those are the first five speakers Sherry Wei, Mark Lance, Margaret Valdez, Rhonda Beard and Shays Brady. So Miss Way, you can begin your remarks when you are ready. Thank you. It looks like I'm. Up and you have 6 minutes. You have 6 minutes. Very good counsel. President Herndon Council members thank you for having this hearing tonight and for asking us to speak and allowing us the permission to do so. Councilman, as Councilman Clarke knows, I have been involved in the short term rental issue for at least the last two years, starting with Mary Beth first meetings on this issue. But frankly, even longer than that, I was the ad hoc committee chairman for Denver, for West Washington Park, and in the process of adopting Blueprint Denver and considering that the implications of that planning initiative for our neighborhood, we considered issues like short term rentals and what would be an appropriate length of a rental for our neighborhood. At that time, we did extensive outreach for residents in West Washington Park, and Carluke concluded that 30 days was the minimum rental that would be appropriate for our neighborhood, and we did that for many reasons. First, we thought, Can you hear me? First, we thought that short term rentals and and short term guests in our neighborhoods was really more of a business use and not a residential use in a residential neighborhood. And as city as city planning has indicated tonight, short term rentals are already permitted inappropriate commercial districts and in this mixed use district. So we found, frankly, there was no need for this type of use in our residential districts. Secondly, we were very concerned about the nature of of the use. It undercuts, in our estimation, the fabric of the residential use of the neighborhood. Why does it do that? Well, short term rental guests, although they may not be troublesome, they may be very good people. They don't send their children to our schools. They don't support our schools that way. They don't take care of elderly neighbors. They don't shop for elderly neighbors. They don't shovel the works for someone. They don't pick up the mail for a vacationing neighbor. They don't walk the dog for a vacationing neighbor. So it's a little bit hard to conclude that a short term rental guest is really a residential occupant. When short term rentals were first proposed, we were induced to consider short term rentals on the basis of a living element alleviating financial distress. This came up initially, as I recall, in 2008, 2009, and the economics in Denver were quite different at that time. So we were induced to think about this to enable people who might be suffering hardships to remain in their homes. We heard that. We also heard the requirement that it might enable people who needed a caregiver to remain in their homes. We also understand that. So to the point of whether or not this promotes the health, safety and welfare of the community, perhaps for those limited basis, I could see that it would do that. However, that can very easily be done with a primary use requirement. We strongly encourage you to adopt this text amendment if you are going to approve short term rentals without eliminating the primary residence requirement. To Nathan Batchelder comment, you can also look at you can look at this as you go along. We have some experience under our belts. I don't think this will happen. But if it does go so swimmingly and everyone says, Gee, why do we have this primary residence requirement, we can always let that go later. We cannot tread back and impose it if we don't do it. Now, another point I'd like to make with my my 6 minutes and president. Or did I hope you'll let me know if I go over to the point of short term rentals being a problem because they're already here and we can't close the barn door after the cow. To that I say, sure we can. Being a business lawyer in the city for 25 years, I have to tell you, I would never recommend to my client that they engage in a business use without checking the code, and if they do, they do it at their own risk. That is the same exact thing that's happening here with people engaging in short term rental businesses without properly evaluating whether they're permitted or not. So in summary, I ask you to consider carefully whether you really believe that short term rentals are consistent with residential uses in residential zones. Many of us in West Washington Park, as you've heard, do not believe that they are. However, if you are inclined to adopt this, we strongly encourage you to do so and adopt the amendment, as Councilwoman Sussman has proposed it, and without eliminating the primary residence requirement. Thank you. Thank you, Ms.. Way. Next, we have Mark Lance. So, um, so I lived downtown. In a 23 storey high rise by 160 or so units, about half of it. It's all privately owned, but about half of them are rental units. And right now at our window, there's about 13 cranes building a brand new apartments, brand new construction, beautiful stuff. And, you know, some of us who have multiple units would like to be able to use short term rentals to combat the competition that's going on down there. So we could use that as a weapon to to fight against that. This is a major revenue stream for the city that comes almost entirely from out of state. And this new sharing technology empowers homeowners on an individual basis. You know, we're talking about empowering thousands of people overnight by allowing them to do this. So this helps us combat skyrocketing costs of health care, skyrocketing cost of tuition, helps us put money away for retirement and to help our families. So I'm just limiting it to primary residents, really puts a major cap on that. We understand that you can't have people taking over these neighborhoods, buying up all the homes and depleting the inventory. But we're hoping that whether it's tonight or some day down the road, that we can come to some sort of moderate solution where we can we can have, you know, two, three, four, whatever extra residences to to rent out on our own. It allows us to have dual uses for guest houses, for family and friends to come in from out of town. And then in the meantime, we can supplement our income with the short term rentals. It's it's really a wonderful thing. So. So that's our thanks for your time. Thank you, sir. Could you say your name for the record? Mark Le Varnish. I have terrible handwriting, so. Oh. Thank you. Next, we have Margie Valdez. Good evening, members of the City Council. My name is Margie Valdez. My address is 28 East 12th Avenue. I am the chair of the RNC Zoning. And Planning Committee, also known as AB. Approximately two years. A subcommittee of SAP was organized for the purpose of analyzing the potential impacts of short term rentals in Denver. The subcommittee held many meetings and a public forum for citizens of Denver. Over 100 residents attended the public forum. Councilwoman Sussman attended all the. Meetings and indeed organized and held town. Meetings as well. The ZAP committee. And ANC delegates voted overwhelmingly to support the proposed ordinance. Provided the primary residency requirement, whereas retained in the ordinance. Our position has not changed. The primary residence requirement is essential for our members. Indeed, this was a compromise. For our members. Residents value the intimate quality of the quiet local streets with single family homes. Denver's neighboring neighborhoods should not be for sale. Residents who purchased their property could not have anticipated that the house next door would turn into a motel and present issues which were not conducive to family oriented neighborhood environment. We thank Councilman Sussman, who worked hard during the past two years to model an ordinance which respects the property rights. Of the many thousand residents in. Denver. It achieves the goal of preserving our residential neighborhoods for families and ensures properties will not be converted to short term rentals based on financial considerations. But instead, those rentals will be available. For those who work in Denver. I urge council to pass this ordinance with a. Primary residency requirement. Thank you. AMOS That as Brenda Beard. Good evening. Thank you for having us. So I'm here tonight to talk a bit about tax revenue on vacation rentals, both primary resident and non primary residents. The tax revenue that it brings to our city and our state. Denver is known to be one of the top business meeting destinations, as well as one of the hottest vacation spots for many worldwide travelers. So in 2015, there was over 15 million visitors and nearly $5 billion came in and nearly 100 million in state and local revenues. So all that money went to the restaurants, attractions, transportation, businesses and supporting people. Over 51,000 people in their jobs. So Denver charges the 10.75% tax on the sale of lodging. And in the first eight months of 2014, I found that Denver raised over $51 million through the lodgers tax, and that was an increase of over 22% from the prior year. And I just think this number will continue to become much greater with all vacation rentals contributing to this tax. And I think if we limit this to only primary residence rentals, we're actually doing a disservice to all the people who would like to visit Denver. It's important that Denver provides lodging to accommodate all desires of our tourists. One of the top reasons people pick a vacation rental home is because they like the privacy and the space and the affordability. We strongly feel that all primary resident and non primary resident vacation rentals should be allowed in Denver and should be required to collect that lodgers tax. We need to encourage tourism in our city and if we outlaw vacation rentals where the landlords have to be there, I think it's detrimental. So please eliminate the primary residence requirement as all short term rentals are a benefit to our economy. Thank you. Amos Behar. Next, we have Shays Brady. And as Shays comes up, I'm gonna call the next speakers, Grant Swanson. Betsy chuckles Bill Marks and John Noble. You four can make your way up to the pew. You can begin your remarks. And I'm going to correct my name is Shane Brady. Jim Brady. I'm. And I must say, I'm going to date. Myself, but I haven't been before city council since Mayor Hancock was on city council. So that was a while back. Good evening. I'm Shane Brady and I live in 9.4 St Paul's Street in Congress Park neighborhood and represented by councilman knew. I'm here on behalf of Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods. We're a registered neighborhood organization here in Denver. We've been around for 45 years. We are a board of 37 residents made up of those that own home. And. Those that rent homes. Our age groups anywhere from late twenties on up, sitting on our board. So over the past two years, while Councilwoman Sussman had the meetings, we did follow them and listen to our delegates coming from in C over the past two years to learn more about the short term rentals, we also had city council representatives come to our zoning land use transportation license committee meeting and tell us more about this proposed ordinance. We did have a vote at our zoning committee and we did favor that. The city passed the short term rental with conditions. We also went before our board and our board voted to. In support of the ordinance to change the current zoning regulations to permit short term rentals. Provided that those are restricted to owner occupied properties. And that was a big discussion among our homeowners and renters. We also asked that. Our city also include the requirement of registration and licensing of short. Term rentals by the city. Thank you. Thank you. Grant Swanson. Good evening. My name is Grant Swanson. I live in the Sunnyside neighborhood in North Denver and I own a short term rental property in the Berkeley neighborhood, also in North Denver. My short term rental is not my primary residence, so if the proposals before council pass in their current form, I will be shutting down my short term rental. I would prefer not to do that. One of the reasons that I would prefer not to do it is that I, as a citizen in North Denver, feel really good about the positive economic impact that my little rental house has on my neighborhood. I use a cleaning service to get the house ready. As guests come and go and the cleaning service is owned and run by a woman who has lived in my neighborhood her whole life. She employs several of her family members. They're an awesome team. They can sweep in and get my house ready in an hour. I when when I was closing my books on 2015, I did the math and I saw that I paid her $5,000 in calendar 2015 for her services. And I felt really good about that for two reasons. First of all, she does a great job. I mean, that's sort of the most important thing. But it also felt really good because those $5,000 stayed right in my neighborhood. My rental property is located two blocks from the intersection of 44th and law. If you spent time in North Denver, you know, that's a really busy intersection. At last count, there are five restaurants arrayed around that intersection. One of the restaurants I've been going in for years and also owned by a neighbor of mine, not a next door neighbor, but a north Denver neighbor of mine. And her restaurant is at the top of the list of the restaurants that I recommend my guests visit. Whether it's a cleaning service or it's a restaurant, having great local businesses in all of our neighborhoods is critical for the health and vitality of our neighborhoods. And my short term rental is a small way to help support my neighborhood's economy. I would encourage the Council to consider an amendment to allow non primary residences to be used as short term rentals so that we can continue to have the impact that we're having on our neighborhoods economies. Thank you. Thank you. Bessie, Chaka and Mamie have 6 minutes. Good evening, council members. My name is Bessie Charges and. I live in the Alma facility neighborhood in my family has owned investment properties for 51 years in Denver. We own Southeast Denver, Denver Country Club, Cherry Creek and in the Highlands also. As an investor whose family has been doing this for 51 years, I can tell you right now I'm really embarrassed about how investors are acting in the state of Colorado right now. They've really changed a lot of things that have been going on in Denver. They don't care about neighborhoods. All they care about is their bottom dollars. And that is not exactly the reason why my family's withstood the test of time over all these years for the good years and bad years. And now the reputation that we do around conserving also our properties that we own in Denver Country Club. But there is no way that any of those people in those neighborhoods would allow an Airbnb to go on in that neighborhood. Trust me, I look like this because I had to go most of my land in between the rain and stuff today. So excuse me, but even when I work on my own properties and the newbies that move into Denver Country Club, look at me like, what is she doing here? And I'm like, We actually on this for a long time. So it's really interesting to see how investors are handling the properties today in Colorado. They make more money than running. Right now, I went on to Airbnb and pulled up 1010 listings that were up there and 30% of them. So three out of the ten, of course, were investors that had their properties up. Right now, my family probably makes about a good $50,000 a month clear. If I did R&B, Airbnb right now, I'd probably make about a half a million a month. Doesn't. I don't care about the money. It's all about how we are and how we represent ourselves and neighborhoods. Money is not the object when you've been running as long as my family has. It's about who we are. And people know us. I grew up in country club, I was born there. And so riding up and down those streets, especially on Lafayette where I was born, I remember all the neighbors coming out and handing me cookies or whatever and making sure that I didn't, you know. Well, at least the sidewalks were in a lot better condition back then than they are now. But I know that families, these investors are not considering families. People that are coming in with young kids want to be able to know their neighbors and make sure that, you know, everyone watches out for their kids. Investors don't care about that. They just care about their bottom line. The number one thing that all these investors don't understand is that it actually does lower your property values. Nobody wants to live next door to a motel. I know that. I don't want to live next door to a motel. And a lot of these investors don't care about their properties. So they turn into like a motel six. I'm proud of the man that has made that has spent, you know, $5,000. And that's great. But nobody wants to live next door to a Motel six when you're trying to raise your family and you want to be part of your neighborhood. There's a lot of different things that happen in property values is the number one thing that's going to go down. And if your neighborhood gets known as an area that there's a lot of Airbnb going on there, you will see the difference and people will start noticing that kind of stuff. So I propose that you keep the way this amendment is that you guys have going on right now, do not allow investors to use their their properties as, as Airbnbs. And like I said, as somebody who's been an investor for decades and decades and decades in Denver, it just makes us look worse than we are today because we are definitely not shining through right now in the state of Colorado. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Bill Marks. Hi there. Good evening. My name is Bill Marx. I live over in the Five Points area and I've been a VR bio AR on VR bio for two years and since I've been able to have my home is a VR bio home, I've actually been able to help the neighborhood in regards the esthetics of the neighborhood, the way the neighborhood looks . My renters that come and rent from me are anyone from doctors, lawyers, people coming to visit sick people in hospitals, parents coming to visit children in school as well as grandparents also coming to visit other children that might be having babies. So my property has helped within that aspect of being able to bring or bringing that neighborhood feel. My renters also go down and use all the local businesses that are close to me. Coffee at the point is also one of them that's near my property. The owners love the fact that I have people come down and support local businesses, which has been very nice. The thing that concerns me a little bit is that the city council is basically infringing on my property rights as a property owner. I don't like the fact that someone can tell me what I can and can't do with my home. And it it I feel it's un-American, it's unconstitutional. And what's next? Are they going to be able to tell me that I can't have an American flag in front of my home? And I would hope that you don't do that to us because I don't want to lose my property rights as a taxpaying citizen. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Marks. Next, we have Joel Noble. And as Joel comes up on the call, the next four speakers George Maile, John Weekley, Clover Stein, Mary Lou thought that I got that wrong job. Rumors. Mr. Council President. Do I have 6 minutes and. You have 6 minutes? Yes, sir. Thank you so much. My name is Joel Noble. I live at 2705 Stout Street and I'm here tonight speaking only for myself. I've been watching this issue for the past couple of years, slightly from the outside. And it was fascinating how it began. It couldn't have been more fractious. The first meetings held with Councilman Sussman and see people who are doing short term rentals. People couldn't be further apart. Those who wanted anything to go, just let's make it legal to those who were saying this is going to be the end of things, that the Denver Post, you know, pretty rightfully summarized as page after page of unrelenting alarm. That's where we started. And with the leadership of Councilwoman Susman and a lot of hard work from I.N.S. and neighbors and people all over the city, it's come together to a pretty good compromise. It's not a compromise that everybody's happy with. But I am proud of Denver. When I see a topic that's given enough time that I can start off with so much animosity and find a pretty good compromise. Now, Denver had a leg up in this. Unlike recreational marijuana, we weren't the first. We didn't have to invent this from whole cloth and wonder what would happen. We could look at what other cities have done and what other cities have done is pretty much what we're doing here. We're just trying to do it a little bit better. We learned that in order to regulate short term rentals, you need to make it easy. You need to make it inexpensive. And we're going further by making it totally online. We learned from other cities that that registration number is vital to compliance. So we're doing that. We learned that you don't add a lot of costs for inspections. You inspect as needed. And the key thing that we learned is an emerging consensus across cities, and it's the primary residence requirement. Other cities have chosen this. Some cities have not chosen this and then reverse themselves and move towards it, including Austin, Texas, which is actually the home of HomeAway, the parent company of VR bio, as they learned that primary residence is a good idea. Why is it a good idea? Neighborhoods will tell you they're concerned about not knowing who lives there. So if there are issues, noise issues, trash issues, etc., they wouldn't know who to talk to. And that's a pretty good concern. But those who are lucky enough to own multiple properties say, Well, I'm concerned that I won't have another way to make money off my properties. I mean, that's a pretty good concern. But I think the key concern is for you to consider as to why the primary residence requirement is important. Came up in this meeting before you even went on break, and it came up more than once. It's the crisis of unaffordability, of housing. This is a crisis in Denver. Redfin just came out with another report today about price escalation in Denver being higher than San Francisco. We're number one. All right. And the primary residence requirement means that we're not creating an incentive for people to take long term rental units off the market in order to put them to use the short term rentals. If it wasn't for the primary residence requirement, we would be creating that incentive and understand that there were earlier alternate ideas and may even be presented later as amendments that people could say, Well, you could have a short term rental at your primary residence, or if you didn't, you could have one more somewhere else. Beware of that, please, because you'd be creating an incentive for those who have the means to have a secondary house to purchase one . Take it off the market and whether it was owner occupied previously or long term rent occupied and put it to use for short term rental and exacerbate the housing crisis by reducing the supply. So I looked around after this, came to the planning board because I did try to keep my distance on this topic and just watch it play out until Planning Board had had considered it. And I found this paper from the Sustainable Economies Law Center regulating short term rentals, a guidebook for Equitable Policy. I'm glad that a barge is very familiar with this paper as well, and it summarizes what's going on around the country in different policies. And there's a lot to this. But they said if affordable housing is a concern in your community, you want a primary residence requirement and then go further and say if affordable housing is a really big concern, you want a primary residence requirement and capped the number of days. It can be used. Because if you cap the number of days it can be used, you might change the economics. Someone might be willing to have a long term renter in their ADU or in their house, in their basement apartment. And if it makes sense for them to do so, they will have a long term renter. But if short term rents are so much more lucrative, they'll do that. So you might cap the days. Now, the city proposal doesn't include a cap on days. It is, as this paper discusses, hard to enforce. Who's going to account for those days? And understand why we didn't go that far. It paper's very fair, though. It does say there is a case where you might not want to consider primary residents. And that's where you want to encourage tourism. And housing is an abundant supply. Someday we should have that problem of abundant supply of housing and falling rents. But we don't have that now. Please honor all the work that's gone in the last couple of years from all the many parties and honor the compromise by accepting this as this in front of you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Noble. I may. I skipped over. Name the next is Brian Egan. Did I say Brian Higgins name? I apologize for that, Brian. And then we're going to go George, John Clover and Mary Lou. So, yes, Mr. Reagan, you. Can begin remarks. Thank you very much. My name is Brian Egan. I live at 606 Lafayette. Most of the co-founder and CEO of a company called Evolve Vacation Rental Network, we're headquartered here in Denver, proudly employ about 100 people. That's a number that's up about four X in the last 18 months. And the number that we anticipate will double within the next 18 months. Our company acts as a effectively a virtual property manager helping second homeowners around North America. To rent out their homes. So we have a lot of experience in this market operating in communities throughout North America, throughout the US. We have about 2000 owners who are in our network. We've conducted about 55,000 bookings across from them or on their behalf, rather for over 275,000 nights. So it's based on that experience that I'm here to address the primary residence restriction that's in this bill and to offer our strong opposition to it. Essentially, as we look at all of the markets that we've operated within and all those 55,000 bookings, there is a very clear pattern that emerges of what works on regulation. There are five drivers. There's owner behavior. There's traveler behavior. There's a community impact. There's revenue impact. And then ultimately, there's enforceability. Across. None of those five drivers is a primary residence restriction versus a non primary resident or a primary resident host versus a non primary resident. An effective or reliable proxy to separate good outcomes from bad outcomes or good actors from bad actors. If you look at each of those five drivers, owners who are a second home owner are no more likely to want their home to be used as a party den, or no more likely to want the erosion of equity value in their neighborhood where they own this home than a primary resident. Guests on the very few occasions, on a percentage basis where guests cause problems, they are completely indifferent as to whether they are causing problems for an owner of a primary residence or a non primary residence. When it comes to a community impact, yes, there are things we need to be mindful of as we approach this for the first time. But again, the permitting process is the best lever and the best mechanism to watch out for communities and nuisance nuisance issues. Enforceability of nuisance laws shouldn't be discriminated between primary non primary on a revenue basis. Primary owners will book more, make more money, will pay their taxes on time, and are far more likely to be compliant. That is true throughout every market in North America that we've studied. And then lastly, when it comes to enforceability, I would just say this. It is very difficult for us to understand how you would know the difference between me at 606 Lafayette renting my house three months a year and living in a nine months a year, and then the following year to vice versa, living in a three months a year and registering again. I'm sorry your 3 minutes are up. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. George Mayo. Good evening, council members. My name is George Male. I'm retired CWA three United States Army Officer, Master, Army Aviator, Combat Pilot. And I am a neighborhood advocate. So let's start real from the beginning. I've been involved with short term rentals since May, since 2010, when I took two bad players in Corey, Merrill and Stokes Place to Board of Adjustments hearing because for a year and a half it took about to shut them down from the wild parties the noise, the trash, the parking. This went on and it was a year and a half before we finally got this stopped. I know a bad player. I've been involved with this for six years. So let's just say it's kind of funny when people come up and talk about it. But, you know, in the book, in the codes, what part of tenancy is arranged on a month to month or longer basis? This is the law of Denver. And what part of. This law did none of these people understand? Did you not know this? That it's against the law and it is now. Not once in all of our meetings. Mary Beth, and thank you very much for what you're doing. Have any of these people stood up and said, I apologize for breaking the law. I apologize to my neighbors for being a bad player. I know that this has been illegal, but I still continue to do it. And I apologize. I've never heard one of them say. I think I'll. Cease and desist until the city council changes the rules. I've never heard that from anybody. I'm kind of ashamed about that. But anyway, that's my perception. You know, it's when I think about it, you have to go back 250 years. And I went back to the Federalist Papers of James Madison. And it probably holds true. Here, as it did. Then, when he stated how to guard. Against factions or groups of citizens with interests contrary to the rights of others or the interests of the whole community. Think about that. That does apply with a lot of online. If whatever you call them now, short term rental people. So anyway, in conclusion, primary resident. Primary resident, I can't stress how important it is that you go back to your neighborhood and the peace and contentment that you have knowing who your neighbors are. Residential neighborhoods are not commercial enterprise zones. They were never meant to be. This is why we have ordinances against less than month to month at the present time. So with that in mind. I think the free passes are over with. It's time to end free passes. Thank you, Chief. Next, Jon Weekly. Thank you, council members. My name is John Weekley. I live in University Hills. These are the facts. Short term rentals are good for Denver. They empower individuals, encourage creativity. Add to the versatility of our progressive city. And they make our neighborhoods better, kept updated and more beautiful than our reactionary neighbors. They create jobs. Imagine Mr. Weekly. Mr.. Mr. Weekly. Jobs. Mr. Weekly, if you could please address the Council. Yeah. Simple jobs like lawn care, house cleaning being created by you and me. That's good for everyone. And to think some of you are still scared of something that does not exist in this industry. Corporations and big investors. This fear is not information to base our decisions on. This fear is not what we build public policy on. We don't make decisions based on what might happen. Let's be clear. If you support the primary residence restriction, you oppose short term rentals. You cannot say you are in support of short term rentals. And at the same time say, but I support a primary residence restriction that doesn't work to be operated correctly. Homeowners generally will need to have another residence. Why? It's pretty simple, actually. Where is the primary residence supposed to go when their primary residence is rented? Well, I'll state the obvious. They would go to their second home. Which would make their second home their first home. Or would it? Now, therein lies the confusion. For the sake of simple functional legislature, drop the primary residence restriction to support primary residents. You're not in favor of improving Denver. You're not in favor of saying to the rest of the state, the country in the world that we are progressive and that we're willing to accept and regulate change in technology. You are not saying I accept versatility and smart growth. You are saying I don't want stars. You are saying I don't want to improve anything. There is no in between. The primary residence restriction is not a compromise. It's a sabotage. To be clear, to support it means you are intentionally swayed by the fear, not the reality, of major operators taking over your neighborhood. The reality is this is not happening and won't happen because it is simply too laborious and time consuming to be profitable for a larger business. There are much easier ways to make a dime, and these rentals are labors of love, more so than profit machines that interest corporations. Please support stars as the majority in the know do by voting down the primary residence clause and moving forward. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Weekly. And audience member I would please ask that speakers address the council. And we, we admire the passion on both sides. We asked if we would be respectful of the speakers and keep our comments to ourselves. Please. Next we have Clovis time. Hi, I'm Clovis Stein. I live in Breckenridge, Colorado. I have two properties in the Sunnyside neighborhood. One of them is a short term rental apartment. I would just like to say that I agree with the last speaker in saying that. If you. Move forward with a primary residence requirement. It is like saying that you don't want short term rentals. I keep hearing a lot of people say that having short term rentals in our neighborhoods is like having a hotel in our neighborhoods. And I'd like to address that idea as I feel it's not in any way an accurate depiction of what short term rentals are. They are not hotels. Hotels are high density, mass occupancy, commercial buildings that do not look anything like the surrounding homes. Once a hotel is built, it will always be a hotel. It will accommodate many different groups of people at a time. The guests are welcome for as little as one night, as long as they have a credit card. There is zero discrimination. Short term rentals are duplexes or single family homes that look just like all of the surrounding homes. They accommodate one group at a time. The majority of these rental properties have at least a three night minimum stay. Guests are prescreened by owners who have a vested interest in keeping their properties in good condition and in keeping a strong standing within their community. Short term rentals are fluid. A hotel will always be a hotel, but a short term rental could one day be a long term rental or a primary residence as needs dictate. We are fortunate to live in a country where home ownership allows us the right to use our property as our needs fluctuate. Currently, our home is a second home for us. It is a short term rental. One day it will be a long term rental. One day it will be a primary residence. One of our recent guests wrote, We were a party of three small children, barely outnumbered by four adults a mom, a dad and grandparents. We're in Denver for the wedding of our son, our brother, our brother in law. And we could not imagine spending five days in a hotel. This home was the perfect solution. They went on to detail the amenities that they appreciated. Sitting on the front porch with the kids while the others slept in, cooking in the backyard with their family from within the neighborhood, using the grill and the patio, the backyard which was fenced in. Our guests are the sons and daughters the brothers, the sisters, the grandparents, the parents of people who lived in these neighborhoods. They are threads in the fabric of these neighborhoods. They are not random strangers. They spend their money here at all the neighborhood restaurants and businesses. They enhance the character of the neighborhood. They do not take away from it. If non primary residents, if non primary residency rentals are banned, visitors to the city will be forced to stay in expensive hotels far from their families, or rent out a spare room in the primary residence of a stranger, or stay in a home that is full of somebody else's primary residence sort of things which is uncomfortable for everyone. This time, your 3 minutes are up. Thank you. Next, we have Mary Lou Fanelli. And as I finally comes up, I'm going to call the next four speakers Craig Ellsworth, Michael C Becker, Aaron Streets, who has 6 minutes. And John. Mary Lou, you can begin on your mark. Good evening. I'm Mary Lou Fanelli. I support limiting short term rentals to primary residences only. I have lived in the 800 block of Steel Street in Congress Park for 29 years. This single family neighborhood facilitates connections, relationships, commitment, and stronger neighborhoods. We know each other, talk with each other, socialize with each other, help each other, care for each other. We are the village that participates in raising children, attending christenings, bar mitzvahs, graduations and weddings. Buying Girl Scout cookies and Boy Scout popcorn. We are baby child, pet and house sitters. Helping hands supporters through family crises. We are the kind of neighborhood that makes Denver a wonderful place for families of all kinds to live. My neighbors and I discovered this spring that the two story Craftsman bungalow at the end of the block was an star advertised on Airbnb as the Steele Street estate, although that listing has been reviewed and removed. 800 Steal Street appears on VR below same content no fancy title described as great for groups. Sleep 16. It is house groups of 1114 1516 800. Steele Street is not anyone's primary residence. Would you like this house on your block? 800 Steel Street was owned for 23 years by a couple who raised four children to adulthood. Their home hosted many neighborhood events. Very loud parties and music emanate from 800 Steel Street during the day and into the night. Numerous nonresident cars park on steel and Adams streets, diminishing parking for residents and their families and friends. Bags of garbage and overstuffed recycle bins are visible from our front porches. Residents occasionally have loud parties, but we know each other and must continue to live with each other. We can ask a neighbor to tone it down, take it inside, or cut it off at a particular time and have that request respected. Strangers have no such allegiance to those who live here. Commercial entities such as 800 steel st limit the property rights of the surrounding homeowners as we are being deprived of the privacy and quiet enjoyment of our primary residences and having our property values diminished. Today's Denver Post reports 2000 staffers in Denver, how those could help alleviate the city's shortage of housing stock. Investors who bought and renovated these properties knew that staffers were illegal. They chose to take this risk. Profit making, not community service, motivated them. The future sale of larger homes and single family neighborhoods. Your time is up. I'm sorry. Thank you. Mr. Craig. Craig Elsworth. 3 minutes. Good evening. My name is Craig Ellsworth. I'm a Denver resident and owner of a short term rental property. I'm also a member of the Capitol Hill United Neighborhood Association. When I applied for my. And it and obtained my business license and lodgers tax ID. I told the city exactly what I was doing operating a short term rental. I support the proposed ordinances with the exception of the primary residence requirement, which I believe will effectively hand Airbnb a monopoly in Denver short. Term middle market. And deprive Denver's visitors of the choice to rent a private home for their stay. These council bills. Proclaim to create, quote, a fair operating environment for all persons in the business of lodging, end quote. In reality, the primary residence requirement unfairly favors Airbnb over competing platforms such as HomeAway and VR Bio, which, by the way, was founded here in Colorado, unfairly favors hosts who rent a portion of their home over those who rent their entire home and unfairly forces hundreds of Denver property owners like myself out of the short term rental market. Over 900 people have signed an online petition calling on Denver City Council to enact regulations that do not limit short term rentals to primary residences. Here's what a few of them have to say. Pam. Arizona's governor clearly realizes that creating a monopoly for Airbnb and forcing visitors to stay in owner occupied homes is bad for the state. Anthony I prefer a short term rental because it connects me with neighborhoods and communities. It gives me an opportunity. To experience places in a way that I would not be able to do if I were forced to stay in a hotel. Brian My family travels to Denver every year and we stay at short term rentals. We have a daughter with special needs, and staying at a hotel is simply not a good fit for our family. When people visit Denver, their transportation choices are virtually unlimited. Visitors can get around by rail, bus, shuttle, bike. Taxi, rental car, cardigan. Zipcar, Uber, Lyft, and even by horse and carriage. Why then, would you restrict their choice of accommodations? I urge you to do the right thing. Please do not hand Airbnb a monopoly. Do not force us out of the short term rental market. And do not deprive visitors the choice of renting a private home for their stay in Denver. Thank you. The industry elsewhere. Michael C Becker. Hi. I'm Michael Schumacher. I'm a law professor and a political science scientist at DU. And what I'm here to do is advocate that the council adopt the perhaps the most flexible rules governing short term rentals to preserve the very robust market. What I'm not going to do is lecture you about. The law unless you want to go to sleep really quickly. I can do that. But what I'd like to do is just share some anecdotal experiences that help you understand how families like mine find it absolutely essential to have a vibrant market for short term rentals. So the first reason is, but for our short term rentals, my family simply would not be able to travel. My husband and I have three small children. Two of them have special needs. We have tried the hotel route and it is simply impossible. There are very few hotels that have three adjoining rooms. They cannot be adequately supervised. They need to be in a home environment just like ours where routine is very important. And we have dinner together. The children make their beds. They cook with us and they clean. Something that is stable. And that is what many families prefer and need. Mrs. Teabagger, could you please speak in the microphone. Before and then me put it down a little bit? So, for instance. When there was a calamity at our house here in Denver, we had to move out for a month. We had to stay in two different short term rentals and could not find a hotel that would accommodate our family. But we did live in. Homes that were available to us. And there's not a huge market. Right now, actually, for homes that are accommodating of my family. I think we need a more robust market than less. And when we visit my mother, who's 85 in Wisconsin, we cannot visit her unless there is a home that we can live in for a short period of time. There are no hotels available where she lives. When we take my other in-laws with us. On vacation, which we just into San Diego. One of my in-laws is battling cancer. She cannot stay in a hotel. Adequately supervised by the rest of us. We have to stay in one family unit in a house together. So that's one reason we can't. Travel, but for this opportunity for short term housing. The second is it really allows us to live in a healthy community environment. We choose to live in areas where we can walk the streets, participate in the community. Go get ice cream at the neighborhood ice cream shop. We're not interested as a family and living next to the airport in a convention hotel. Finally, I think it actually promotes responsibility. We are not the partiers and I don't think there are many. There may be some, but I think the vast majority of folks who do this are interested and respecting the owners of the property. Just like you would respect your own home. One of the people from whom I rented right here is now one of my very good friends. People who had rented from me when I previously had a very low property. Have become my very good friends, stayed at my rental property for ten years in a row at Thanksgiving and actually became such good friends. She's out here visiting. Right now for my husband's retirement party, which I'm starting. To. I apologize. 3 minutes are up. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Aaron Street. Erin Streets. She left. Okay. Next, John Neiman. Let's look at Europe. Hello and good evening. My name is John Joseph Newman. Everyone calls me JJ. I live at 2786 South Wolfe Street. I come here as a resident, but I also come here as the president of the Denver in our neighborhood cooperation. Also a board member of the Harvey Park Improvement Association. We have done, as I am, see a lot of research and worked very closely with council to understand the different, finer points of this short term rental discussion and feel. Bear with me on an allegory. Another one of these floods happens and Denver right goes up into the mountains and is going along our rivers and seas. Thousands of rainbow trout have been washed up on the shores and he sees one person there on the shore picking up the rainbow trout one by one and throwing them back into the river. And he goes up to this young man and he says, Why are you doing this? There's thousands of fish along this riverbed. There's no way that you could save them all. And he grabs one fish and he looks at him. He says, Yeah, but at least I saved this one and threw it into the river. Now, I'm not saying we have all the answers to what and short term rentals are going to be. But I do know that our neighborhoods are vital. They don't need to be revitalized. We don't need an even more business investment in our neighborhoods. What we need is a way for these sharing economies to help build and protect neighborhoods. We have over 2600 or 266,000 households that fall within the registered neighborhood. Organizations that are members of Denver agency. And most of them have the opportunity to be able to participate in this in the process. And over the last two years, we've heard from so many of those residents. And what we are consistently hearing is that short term rentals are illegal for a reason and that a lot of the residents would like to see them stay illegal. But through our work and through that, we have seen that having this restriction is a compromise. It's a compromise that allows neighborhoods to take charge and be in charge of how their homes are relating to business use around around their homes. As Kevin Flynn talked about in my neighborhood, there was one property where someone lived there and then moved away and proceeded to rent it out to a bunch of short term rental people that did not respect that neighborhood. And it took more than a year even with an HRA covenant for that neighborhood to be able to stand up for the kind of community that they wanted. I think the rule that we're trying to pass today. Is a good one and it'll allow the neighborhoods to continue to have input into how their neighborhoods are organized. I look forward to working with Stacey Luke as we find more ways to. Regulate and without the primary restriction, I just I don't see how the neighborhood. Could support this measure. Thank you. James Neiman. All right, I'm gonna call the next five speakers. Michael Guggenheim. Michael Guggenheim, Lance Musselman, John Ludvig, Cris S and Gina D'Ambrosio. So Mr. Guggenheim, you can begin your remarks and the other for you can go ahead and take a seat at the front pew. Thank you. I'm Michael Guggenheim and I live in the Bunny Brain neighborhood and have lived in Denver since 1981. I've been a long term property owner, a long term rental property owner, and a short term property rental owner. So I have covered the gamut. I have had in on the same block and I've had after I've had two short term rental properties at one time. Now we have one and we're soon to have zero by the end of the year. But I have a strong interest in in there not being a primary residence provision. There is also a member of the Denver short term rental alliance, which is there's a group of a group of us that have that we obviously oppose the primary residence provision. And and I'd like to speak to the issue of of enforcement and compliance as a builder in Denver as well, I'm very familiar with enforcement and compliance and the necessity of it. We are a group that is interested in regulation. We are interested in enforcement, we are interested in compliance. And and in all of those things can contribute, if done correctly, to short term rentals that that that contribute to the to the fabric of the neighborhood. I would invite Councilman Cashman, who's whose neighborhood I meant to come, take a look at the properties that they have. They are beautiful. We have had zero complaints from neighbors. My neighbors are aware of what I'm doing and they all have a way to get a hold of me if if there were to be any issues which there have not been. And and I think that's important for anybody who is doing short term rentals to have that communication with their neighbors, whether long term or short term. We have paid tens of thousands of dollars in and in in in lodging tax in Denver. And it is at this point, I think that if there were to be a primary residence provision, as has been mentioned by others previously here this evening, it would be a death sentence for for short term rentals. I would never go to a place where where somebody has all of their their their belongings at the home. It wouldn't feel comfortable there. We have had we've had families that have been in town for for a number of reasons. Professor C Becker, who spoke earlier, was a guest of ours. And we wonderful friends now and his family was was was fabulous. And we have many guys like that. And we promote and and support short term rentals without the short without the primary residence provision. Thank you. Thank you. Lance Musselman. Good evening, council members. My name is Lance Muslim and I live in Washington, part of Washington Park East. I've been there for over 30 years, raised a family there. I've been involved in community affairs and I'm invested in the community. I'm here to support the amendment that restricts staffers to single to primary dwellings. I also support the companion bill, the excise and licensing on implementing that. I believe it's well thought out. I believe it can work. I do believe I have cautions about going beyond the primary residence. This legislation is going to introduce an endless stream of legal transients into every neighborhood. These people are not invested in our neighborhood. They don't know us. What stays in Vegas or what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? Well, maybe what happens in Denver stays in Denver. This is a grand social experiment endorsed by public policy. I believe it's incumbent upon the the council to proceed cautiously. You have the time to do it right to make sure you take your problems, take care of problems as they come up. I urge you to do that and not rush into this precipitously and expand it to the point where we have thousands of these basically legalized neighborhood hotels everywhere in Denver. Thank you. Thank you, John Ludvig. Good evening, council members. My name is John Ludwig and I advocate for. Short term rentals. I was a teacher and. Principal in Denver. Public Schools and that honor of. Working with many children in the city. And the one thing I taught them, I hope I taught them that they took with them was to eradicate fear through knowledge. And when you know people and you meet people and you see different cultures walk in your world, it opens your eyes. And I'd like to speak primarily to that. I have some individuals I have being a teacher, I'm big on show and tell. So I brought my friends with me. But there's a gentleman here from France, from Bordeaux. France mowed my lawn today. I bet I'm the only one in the room who got that done. There's a gentleman over there that is Airbnb host for my wife, who travels extensively. I married a genius for the sake of the children. So off she goes. And she works in hospitals. And she was going from Hilton to this hotel. To that hotel. And no, sir, we don't know where she is because room three or two is an answering. Now, my friend Stephane calls me and says, Jan had a hard day at work. What can we do? I said, Try Scotch first and butter pecan ice cream secondly. And he went out and bought the ice cream for her. That's what because what we have in this Airbnb relationship, my next door neighbor went to the hospital with a bellyache, came back with stage four ovarian cancer. We're all devastated. Blew us out of the water. Every one of us. These gentlemen are French cooks. They went across the street and they shared recipes for 2 hours. For 2 hours, she was cancer free. I think that's important. I think that's what we've got to deal with. You've got to open your eyes and look at the rest of the world and they're coming to Denver. Boy howdy. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Chris. S. Good evening, counsel crisps and I'm relatively new to the Denver area. I just kind of want to point out that since 2015, the amount of complaints related to the short term rental market as investigated by the city of Denver. One, two. 345646. Total complaints in relationship to short term rentals in the city of Denver that were investigated for our last council meetings. Think it's a little overzealous and a little rushed to consider this kind of statistic against several thousands of these short term rentals that we've been stating and some of the debates we've had that, you know, we go to shut down something that is showing such great community, you know, building and also opportunities for someone like me to be in Denver and enjoy, you know, what you. Guys got here and then work up. To be a primary resident in this fine state so or city. And I'm also currently living in downtown and I'm in a very healthy community where there are short term rentals. And I want to say that the neighbors and the neighborhood is better off with it. And those people that I interact with daily tend to be some of the highlights and a really good part of my time here in Denver. Thank you. Gina and Ambrosia. Is Gina in the chambers? She left. Okay. I will call the next five speakers. They are John Beck, Chris Benton Lane Bates, James Slaughter and Jeff Macko. So you five can make your way up. And Mr. Beck. John Beck. You can begin your remarks. That's me. So my name is Mr. Beck. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Denver Show Terminal Alliance. I own a single family home located in the Lower Highland neighborhood of Denver. I've owned this property for about three years, during which time it's been operated entirely as a short term rental. I don't live on the property. I have some prepared remarks, but I think most everything has been spoken and I'd like to kind of go off my prepared remarks, make a few other comments. I think Mr. Eagan said it best that there is there is a disconnect between the issues that people think that we're solving with these proposed ordinances requiring primary residency and the the real issues that are out there and the evolve people. He's the CEO of that particular company. They've been able to really narrow in on the things that do impact bad performers and bad tenants and bad owners. And I don't believe it's necessarily a primary residency requirement. So I think we should be very careful because there's an opportunity here to legislate or two to create an ordinance that doesn't actually do what we want it to do, but it will kill an industry. We know that. I think it's been pretty I think it's been said that there's a lot of people that are going to go out of business. I would be one I was going to go through the statistics of how much money that I've made that has stayed here in the Denver area over the last three years that I've owned my property. It's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, housekeepers, restaurants, and that's a lot of people. And to say a little bit about the people that staying in these PRB O's and these these short term rentals, I have a family of five and I exclusively stay. Everywhere I go, we travel all around the country. It's always a home. It's always in a residential neighborhood. You know, we are impeccable and determining that we were going to keep that house as perfect as it was when we found it there. All impeccably maintained. The house that I have, I've spent $100,000 in maintaining it over the last three years. It's perfect. It's better than all of my neighbors houses. I have to do that in order to continue to attract people. It's a beautiful place. And so that will go away. And when you look at across the board, that's a lot of money going out of the local economy. And I don't believe you're going to get what you think you're going to get with this ordinance. You are going to lose it. You are going to lose the industry. And I think, you know, it's fighting against the trend that in its inevitable anyway those are just my comments. I you I appreciate the opportunity to speak and I urge you to consider removing this restriction. Thank you, Mr. Beck. Chris Benton. Chris Benton no longer in chambers. Okay, next we have Lane Bates. Good evening, counsel. My name is Lane Bates. I live downtown. I do own another property in the Curtis Park neighborhood. Just a couple of blocks from Coffey on the point. A little bit about the demographics of people that come and stay at my property. Most of them are the tourists slash visitors are families that are traveling as a family. 700 square feet, the average visitors approximately 50 plus in age and is traveling with their children or grandchildren. They rent SD cards to attend graduations, weddings, baby births. A lot of a lot of the older couples rent it to come visit their grown children that live here in Denver. They ran stars so they can stay as a family and a home without incurring high costs associated with purchasing a suite at a hotel. It's not to say hotels aren't bad. I stay in hotels myself sometimes. SDR is used in this capacity must be pristinely maintained there reviewed after every stay the they must be maintained interior and exterior. As such lawns are maintained. Property owners continue to invest in home improvements to attract tourists to their homes. It's competitive, thus increasing the property value of the neighborhood. Two additional points. Number one, the effect of the regulation. We know how many because we can go on the website, how many Airbnbs and how many home away's are here in the city of Denver ? What we do not know, and if we pass this regulation, we do not know how many of those are primary occupancy. So we could, as a last speaker noted, completely wipe out this industry. We just don't know. And I don't think there's any data out there that I have seen that shows the number of listings, their primary occupancy. The other thing that has been noted is this. This does favor one platform over another platform. And finally, hotels have a place in this business in tourism. Stars have a place in in tourism. The one thing I'll note is that when you build a hotel, it's built. It will always be a hotel. When you have a residence that is an STR, it can go to a long term rental. It can become a residence. You can sell it on the open market, or it can go back to a short term rental. It's scalable. As the market expands, as it contracts with the number of tourists that come into town, it can go from long term. Short term. And then you can sell it. To somebody else. Once you build a hotel, it's built. I am strongly opposed to this primary residency requirement. Thank you for your time tonight. Vigorous debate. James Slaughter. I respectfully. Ask. Okay. Thank you, sir. Jeff, make. Jeff Nichols, not in chambers. All right, then we are moving right along. The next speakers are Nick Magno, Janelle, Janelle Kenny, Andrea Phillips, Charles Charles Busch and Robert Cotton. So. Is Nick in the building? Nick Magno. But these are okay so does not seem Nick is in chambers next is Janelle Kinney. I'm Janelle Kenny. I live in the Overland's neighborhood. I want to highlight the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of the primary versus non primary requirement. I'm actually a primary resident and am a constant advocate for allowing the nine non primary residents because the primary occupancy requirement is absolutely unshaded. There is no data that supports the claim that absentee owners are less responsive to neighbors needs and concerns, or that they generate any more or less complaints making non primary residency rentals illegal. But legalizing primary occupancy residents is discriminatory and is inconsistent with other Denver rental legislation. Long term rentals are not held to the same requirement. They do not have to have an owner living on the property to be in compliance with city zoning. To illustrate the ineffectiveness of this requirement in 2015, I quit my job and went on a six month round the world travel adventure. I continued to rent my house out on VRBO and hired a friend to arrange all bookings, manage the cleanings and act as the primary point of contact. I was far removed from. The daily operations. In contrast, I have friends who, upon the birth of a child, upgraded their home less than a mile away. They decided to keep their first home and rent it out on VRBO. They manage all bookings themselves, arrange for their cleanings and maintenance, and personally go and visit the house between guests. In both scenarios, the house is well-maintained, cared for and the consideration of the neighbors and neighborhood is high. The irony is that the first scenario mine is completely legal because I am the primary resident, even though I wasn't even on the same continent. In the second scenario, where the owners visit the house on a regular basis and are the direct contact with the guest. That is illegal because they are not the primary residence of their second home. There are hundreds of families in Denver, much like my friends, who treat their short term rental not only as their asset but as their home because it is their home. Please consider voting no to the legislation as it's written and instead work to pass regulate regulations that are fair, consistent and nondiscriminatory. Thank you. Thank you. Andrea Phillips. Andrea Phillips. All right, next, Charlie Bush. Hi. My name is Charlie Bush and I live at 715 South Sherman, two blocks within the I-25 and Broadway light rail station. I have two staffers within a half a block of my home, one Airbnb and one VR bell. They both started out the same way. Somebody's bottom is flips. Then they tried to sell them for more than $200,000 over the market rate. Now they're both stars. Let me share with you what it's like living this close to two stars where Swatch Park has older homes. We have a very green way for air conditioning. We open our windows at night and turn on the fans. However, every Friday and Saturday and sometimes during the week. We have parties. The VR Beyond Lincoln seems to favor the Texas frat boys that invite 30 to 70 of their closest friends that they've never met for an all night party. The police are repeatedly called the. The renters don't care. They leave in the morning. Mothers of small children have called me at 3:00 in the morning in tears, begging me for help with the party next door. I have complied only to wake up to multiple broken beer bottles on my front lawn. I didn't call the cops because I knew these guys were already at the airport. We have lost two young families with children on our street in the last year alone because of the threat of stars. The stars have turn r friendly. Everybody else has everybody's back hamlet into an organizing bunch of vigilantes. Let me repeat that. Our nice little neighborhood is turning into vigilantes, and we despise it. But we're not going to stop because there's no laws and the police can't stop what's going on. I had to throw two gentlemen off my porch that were shaken up three cans and say, no, no, no. You know, property damage is not the answer. We do have a number of long term rentals, too. To be honest, you know, those owners do not contribute to the neighborhood, but their renters do. They have learned how to have good renters. And we as neighbors turn them into better renters. It can take some time to have them shovel their walks and mow their lawns. But they get there and they enthusiastically watch our backs and watch the street. And especially when we have our front porch parties, we are able to achieve this because somebody lives in the property for more than two days in a row. Primary residency. If you throw out the primary residency, then throw out the zoning code and throw out the money you're going to spend spend on. Blueprint Denver. Because the difference between residential and commercial will no longer exist. Our residential neighborhoods are for Denver residents, not for Denver tourists, and not for Denver commercial stock. Rent residential does not mean hotel on every block or every other house. Residential means long term community. If it's good enough for the other cities, it's good enough for Denver. Thank you. Thank you. Robert Cotton. Good evening. My name is Robert Cotton. I'm resident northwest Denver. I'm a software engineer by trade. And in my line of work, we build our business on data. We collect a lot of data and we make lots of decisions on data. And in the places that we don't have data, we have blind spots in our decision making process. And we work very hard to eliminate those blind spots because it impacts the type of decisions that we make, because we are not making those decisions based on data. By having the primary residence restriction in this in this provision, we will be eliminating half of the data that is available to us in studying and studying short term rentals as we go forward. By having only primary resident rentals, we will eliminate non primary resident rentals and will not be able to understand how it is that those rentals will behave. Those rentals are happening today. Short term rentals are happening in houses, they are happening in primary residents and non primary residents. So it is, as Nathan was pointing out, is this feasible today? It is feasible, but we don't have any data. I've been attending the town halls and it's not surprising because it is in fact illegal that there is a lack of data that provides information as to how it is to drive this this decision making process. By having a short term resident restriction, we will be eliminating that data. The the short term rental market is lucrative, and there will be bad actors that will happen and will operate outside the bounds of the law. We won't have any visibility into them, into that sort of into that activity. Compliance will be much higher if we have short term non primary resident short term rentals available as an option for for Denver residents to be able to do this. We will not know the number of resident of houses that are being used for this purpose. Today it's less than 1/10 of 1% or less than a 10th of a percent of of housing in Denver. We all know the behavior of those of those operators, both the tenants and the owners of those houses. We all understand the tax revenue of those of those houses. Most importantly, we all understand the compliance. The easier it will be to comply, the easier it will be to bring those people in to the fold and have compliance. Thank you very much. Thank Mr.. Can you call the next five speakers Tim O'Byrne, Nurse Abdurahman, Jill Bishop, Damien Hertz and Charlotte Wins and Berg. Those are the next five. First one is Tim. So you can begin your remarks. My name is Tim O'Byrne. I live at 508 South Clarkson. I've been living in Denver for about 59 years now. I grew up in Park Hill. We had the smallest family on the block. We only had six kids. People across the street at ten people two doors down had 13. So we had big families. And we were all very close. Everyone knew each other pretty well. And surprisingly, a lot of these people are still my friends. I'm very excited with what the changes I've seen in Denver over the past few years. It's a little scary with so much going on now for us old farts that have been here, but it's it's really exciting to see the change is going on. Transportation, different things like that. But I do feel one of the key ingredients to Denver to making it this great city to live in is the neighborhoods. And I sincerely believe that the short term rentals will not work. That will not help that. Just this past, about a month ago, I woke up early on a Friday morning and I could hear babies crying in our neighborhood. And the families are moving back into Denver now for so long people are moving to the suburbs. And I sincerely believe that with the short term rentals, if we are going to have on what it looks like we are, that we do need the primary resident as a concern. I was talking earlier about some of the things in Denver that excite me. There was something this week about the Denver prepares final smart city challenge pitched to win 50 million for transportation. That's pretty cool, but I don't think we can use the term smart city if we don't regulate these short term rentals. Thank you. Thank you. Nessa Abdurrahman. Hi. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Abdul Rahman. I live in downtown. Denver. And own a couple of properties there. I do not currently do short term rentals. However, I would like the opportunity to do that in the future. I can see that as council members, you have a very daunting task. There's impassioned pleas. From both sides of the argument here. And I'll keep my comments very, very short. I do understand the dilemma keeping affordable housing affordable, affordable, while at the same time respecting and encouraging the rights of contributing members of society to earn a living, either through supplementing or that. Might be their. Sole source of income. I do also understand we don't want corporate takeover of our rental market. By the same token, I do understand we don't want actors that are not part of the community that are going to cause a disturbance. My experience is solely from friends of mine that have done short term rentals, and my understanding is the vast majority of the people to stay in their units are very responsible professionals, lawyers, doctors, performing actors and so forth. So to keep it short, what I would like to say is I think a fair compromise. Would be. Not have carte blanche on private non primary residents, but at the same time not to restrict to primary residents, only to have a fair balance. Maybe just a couple of units that residents own could be allowed for short term rentals. I think that would be a fair compromise. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jill Bishop. Hi. Thank you for the snacks, Ralph, even though he's not here. My name is Jill Bishop, and I live in Park Hill at 25th and Monaco, and I'm a Denver native, and I have a lot of pride about Denver. I like to spend my tax money in Denver and so on. I've been an Airbnb host probably longer than anybody who has spoken. I signed up before the DNC in 2008. I've had well over a thousand guests, but it's in my home where I live too, and I'm single and I've never had one bit of fear or safety issue. Thanks in part to all the safety features built into Airbnb, I get to choose exactly who comes to stay in my house and even before they come they are not random strangers. There's absolutely nothing scary about any of this. The only thing that scares me is having to put my license number published for all to see in case anybody really wanted to find out who I was and where I lived. They could only, thanks to that regulation that you're going to impose that I support. I totally support Mary Beth's proposal and hope that you will vote for it. People come for every reason imaginable. And it's some people say it's not sharing, but I totally share my home and I share meals and I share experiences. And because of that, I was a host first. But that's the only way I like to travel. When I was in Paris last November and I was staying in an Airbnb apartment with with the hosts there, and the attacks happened. And we stayed up all night watching the TV and talking and stuff. And when I left, he said, Oh, I enjoyed having you so much. And I especially was glad you were here the night of the attacks. And I felt the same way that I was so glad I wasn't alone in a hotel room the night of the attacks in Paris. People are wonderful. The guests who come are absolutely wonderful. I've had well over a thousand and I can only say I've had two that I wouldn't want back, but there was nothing like really bad about them. I just, you know, didn't care for them that much. And, you know, everything about the economy. And if the Kirkland Museum gave out awards for people who send people there, I would be number one. I'm sure I've sent to their close now, but I'm sure I've sent 150 people to the Kirkland Museum. And one thing Airbnb has done for me is it's made me I think I retired from teaching about a year earlier because of my Airbnb income and my daughter lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood and does Airbnb. And I think she would be on welfare if she didn't have that income. And she and her boyfriend friend are artsy fartsy types. And even though he plays and wears the light for the time. It's actually right there and it just turned red. I'm sorry you had you had 3 minutes. Exactly. Mr.. I'll then. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Damien Hirst. Is Damien in chambers now? Charlotte Winsberg. Hello, everybody. My name is Charlotte Winston and I live at 590 South Sherman. And I come to speak in support. Support of the ordinance regulating short term rentals. For two years, I've served on the ad hoc committee of I and see that address has been addressing short term rentals and. I have three points that I really want to emphasize with you. Number one, the ordinance before you reflects the work of council staff and the citizens of Denver. Its most important element is the restriction allowing only primary occupants of homes to obtain licenses for short term rentals. Any relaxation of this requirement really voids the whole purpose of the ordinance. You might as well just forget it because. What we need is we're trying to do here is protect the nature of residential zoning. And I think it's unfortunate that many of these operators of this short term rentals don't really understand what zoning is for. And residential. Zoning is. Very important. There probably aren't a lot of people behind me who have looked at the use tables in ours. The articles of our zone that describe exactly what uses can be added if we add properties that are not primary resident, we are putting a pure commercial use into a residential zone and that in itself doesn't seem like such a big deal, but it weakens the whole nature of the code. And what's going to be next will be, oh, what it will be next. There'll be other commercial enterprises coming in are saying, well, you let, you let the motels come in down the block, why can't I do something else? Put my restaurant here or my body shop there? It's it's that first chink in. The in the dike. And it's really important to keep commerce commercial areas, commercial zoning and residential zoning definitely and separated. Secondly, we've got a severe housing shortage here. I don't know. And we need to preserve residential uses as much as we possibly can, rather allowing conversion to commercial use. Number three, that was number two. Some people contend that being a landlord of a long term rental is just fraught with terrible, nightmarish experiences, and they conclude that this experience is so bad, city council should let them just use those properties this short term rentals. Well, my husband and I have been landlords in Denver for 40 years. Long term. Got to go fast. Long term tenants. No big problems. Never had an eviction. And Williamsburg indictments are up. Thank you. Just thank you. Mary Beth. I didn't get a chance to say that. I'm going to call the next five speakers. We are over halfway done. Carolyn Shaw, Maureen Wood, Norman Wilson, Alex Dodd and Jacob Lill. So you five can make your way up. Carolyn Shaw. You can begin your remarks. Is Caroline Shaw in the building? No. Caroline Shaw. Okay. Next is Maureen Wood. Hi. My name is Maureen Wood and I live at 4392 Wenonah in the Berkeley neighborhood. First, I'd like to thank all of you for letting us all speak and listening. I know it's a long night. I have lived in the Berkeley neighborhood for two years, and when my husband and I bought our house, we were fortunate enough to be able to find a house with an accessory dwelling so that our parents could visit and our family members could visit and stay close to us. We don't have a hotel in our area that's that's close by where our family can spend time with us when they come to visit. Well, those are only, you know, a few weeks out of the year. And we've also been fortunate enough to be able to open up that accessory dwelling to our neighbors families when our families aren't staying in our accessory dwelling. I've really enjoyed meeting my neighbors families. I've met so many grandparents and aunts and uncles and as well as business travelers and people who are are trying to move to the area and work for Regis. I've really enjoyed the amount of socialization and meeting neighbors that our short term rental has brought to my life. And I really, you know this I don't see the downside from us. I think that if nothing else, it has brought something. Positive to our neighborhood. So I would ask for. You guys to vote for the ordinance today and support short term rentals. Thank you. Thank you. Norman Wilson. Thank you. And I'm Norman Wilson. I'm a Denver resident. And I'd like to quantify just a little bit. I think what we're really talking about is about a problem that is 1% of a 1% of all residences in Denver. And so it reduces down to maybe 1001 out of a thousand. That is the problem. Very simply, I take. Issue with. The matter of this being this proposed legislation requiring primary residence. I don't think that's really addressing the issue. It's a rather blunt instrument. It's rather too simple for a nuanced, more nuanced problem. I think maybe the council and Flynn would understand this. And the. Sitting zoning, for instance. Offers many gradations. But the gradations are not entertained in this. Rather either or proposal. We're moving toward more density. And there's more mobility. Again, I'm not sure that this is really addressed. It's again, either or. And the stars sometimes the stars are rather small properties. Rather large. Lots. That would be another way of looking. At the. Problem. Some even. Not occupying 10%. Of the lot itself. And the issues brought up with problem with. Regard to problems typically. Could be covered by code issues, noise, excessive drinking. Whatnot. We have code. That covers this. And so it seems to. Me that is an issue. That could be put aside. Neighborhood groups are very. Useful and. It's hard to be representative. You probably understand that best of all. And the neighborhood groups sometimes are not terribly. Representative. And they sometimes have a rather near horizon and they don't take a long range view. With regard to primary residents. Travelers typically don't expect to have an. Owner or primary. Resident in the. Property. And so to go back to the Airbnb issue. That is a model which could be. Troubling because it creates a kind of a density that maybe we don't want a kind of. Short, very short term and. Very dividing up the properties. We really ought to keep the property whole so it can return back to a residence. Maybe makes better sense. That would eliminate. And that. Argues for eliminating the. Primary residence. And I would say. That what we. Might want to do. Is, unfortunately, despite all the staff. Work. Despite all the town hall meetings, maybe go back and take a. More nuanced approach to this legislation. Mr. Wilson, you're throwing everything mantra. Thank you, Alex Dodd. Good evening, city council. Men and women, thanks for taking the time to be here. Thanks, Concerned Citizens for being here too. It's great to see such an engaged community. I really appreciate the sharing economy. Task Force led by Councilwoman Susman is effort and pledges re legislating short term rentals in other aspects of the sharing economy. I feel it's a valiant and well-intended, although severely misguided legislation and its current verbiage. In particular, the primary residence restriction has numerous economic repercussions, consequences that I don't think has been addressed by city council or many citizens here. This housing shortage that many refer to. I don't understand that the fact that vacancies in Denver's rental market that's arguably very saturated have been increasing month over month. Since January of this year, many large apartment rental companies are turning to services such as stay off grid large out-of-state conglomerates that manage dozens of short term, if not more short term rental properties in Denver. To quell the increasing vacancies in Denver's rental market, short term rentals are an effective way to increase the vibrancy of our city, to increase tourism to our city, and allow our city not to be constrained by limited hotel and lodging inventory. Amidst some of the most insurmountable amount of tourist demand that we've seen across the city is up year over year, season over season, and it shows no sign of stopping. Similarly, the number of short term rental listings increase and they also show no sign of stopping. If the primary residency restriction were to continue to be in place, it effectively it would it would contribute greatly to the economic collapse of our rental market here and would have significant ramifications. Not to mention it would also prohibit hosts that have relied on this income stream to sustain themselves and contribute to our community to continue hosting and allow this commute and allow this income stream. I can speak personally for the over $100,000 of lodging tax that I could have personally collected remitted to the city last year but had no structure to do so. Only large operators that were given special treatment by the city have the opportunity to remit this lodging tax last year , and by eliminating the ability of hosts to have additional residences other than their primary to rent out on a short term basis, the city will be leaving millions of dollars of additional tax revenue on the table. Where am I getting these numbers from? Well, simply extending a macro out of what I know are is the current vacation rental economy. In fact, there's been no economic feasibility study or impact study that's been presented by by Excel nor D nor community planning and development. And I think it's incredibly shortsighted to be allowing the few vocal, xenophobic members of our community to guide this legislation. Those with the most time on their hands should be the ones that should be dictating this. It should be those that are contributing to the greatness in the city and contributing to the tourism market in our in our town, too, as a fifth generation native member of the resident of the ninth District for five years and Concerned City and concerned Denver future Denver resident, I implore the city to table the legislation as is, or at least consider amendment allowing for non primary residences to be read to be read it. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Jacob Lew. And as Jacob comes up, I call the next four Keith Brian, Andrea, Andrea Phillips, Thad, Texar and George Burleson. Go ahead, Mr. Bell. Good evening. My name is Jacob. Lill and I live in the Harvard Gulch neighborhood. So I want to share a little bit of my experience with Airbnb and short term rentals. So several years ago, I had never heard of Airbnb before. I had my aunt who was very sick with cancer in California, and I packed up my family. I packed up the dogs and we went out there not knowing how long we were going to have to stay. But she was on her deathbed. There wasn't a hotel near to where she was staying and receiving treatment. The closest hotel was over 45 minutes away. Excuse me. We were able to find an Airbnb less than 5 minutes away to where my family could stay, too, where our pets were allowed, where we could cook meals for our families. And, you know, it was a really hard time in my family's life. But without that Airbnb at that time, it would have been a lot worse. That's how I came to know of short term rentals in Airbnb's and VR boats. Years later, I was presented the opportunity to work for a company that manages short term rentals. I've been doing this for a little over a year now, and I've seen all types of guests. I've seen all types of property owners. I've seen all types of arrangements. I've seen rentals with primary residence, with non primary residence and everything in between. And I'll tell you, a few of the guests that I see the most in our line of work are traveling professionals coming to Denver for any number of reasons doctors, lawyers, nurses, businessmen and women. More than anything, I see families, though. I see families visiting their children, visiting their parents, visiting new grandchildren. We see all types. We've see roughly 2000 guests per month. And in our entire time of being in business, we've had maybe a handful of issues. Nothing ever too serious. The guests we see are great. Our property owners, they're great. One issue we've run into with our non primaries residents, property owners are all the things in their house and they're not able to manage a successful rental the way we like to do it and provide the best guest experience possible. I asked the city council to reconsider the primary residence restriction because I think it's cheating the guests. I think it's cheating the city. And I think it's cheating the short term rental industry from maturing into the industry that I know it could become. And I don't think it's right. Thank you for your time. Think it, Lou. Keith Pryor. Good evening, Mr. President. And thanks so much for hearing us and allowing us to have this opportunity to speak. A couple of things. One, I definitely applaud the process. Thank you, Mary Sussman, for leading this and the, you know, bringing together the people to work through this. And I definitely am in very much support of having a framework in which to work short term rentals, which is desperately needed to regulate this. I do not support that it be a primary resident. If you listen to a lot of the comments tonight, a lot of them really center around, well, it needs to be stable for our neighborhood. People need to send their children. This does not allow for neighborhood cohesiveness. These people would not allow a long term rental. Most long term rental leases, 30 days, 60 days or a year. Really do not send their kids to those schools. And we allow long term rentals throughout our city. And have most of the people that have spoke against this ordinance and having that short term rental be a primary residence would not really want to have long term residents, be long term rentals even be allowed in their neighborhoods. So I want you to kind of think about that, because even with long term rentals, you still have the same issues that a lot of people have brought up throughout this evening. In regards to those concerns from the neighborhoods. I would like to see something of an amendment brought forth when we did the rezoning for the entire neighborhood, for the entire city. We brought forth the 80 you again huge opposition from neighborhoods that would not allow a to use in their neighborhoods. Now that we've had that passed. Neighborhoods are coming forth and saying, wow, I really want that. I have an elderly parent. I have somebody that I need to bring in to my family situation. I would like to have an Adu. My neighborhood doesn't allow that. I want zoning to rewrite this, to allow an overlay district for my neighborhood to have an ADU. And so now that we've had them and now that you're seeing this come into place, you're really seeing people look to that as like, oh, I'd like to augment my income by having enough to you and having that additional income stream by having an additional rental property on my lot, which we do not allow in the city unless you're in certain districts. And it's also helped with our housing crisis as a way to look at our housing crisis is to allow ADU use to occur. So these same neighborhoods that did not want to allow 80 years did not want to allow for a three storey building in your neighborhood where there was an existing church on Colored Boulevard and Monaco. That was a great transit corridor and they are in a lawsuit about that. So these same neighbors who are complaining about 80 years about a housing crisis are also complaining about density in which to solve our actual housing crisis. Mr. Prior, you're three months or so. Could you say your name for the record to what you say your name for the record? Oh, sure. Keith Pryor. So thank you. I support this, but not the primary residence. Thank you, Mr. Pryor. Andrea Phillips. Andrea Phillips is not here. That Texan. Thad, Texas. Members of Council. Amazingly, some people actually think of me as disrespectful. But I'll tell you what real disrespect is. It's people who violate our laws, who don't care about their neighbors, who come in front of you and testify openly of that and then say, sanction my behavior. It would be one thing if these people said, I think short term rentals are a good idea. Let's talk about it. I'd engage in that discussion. They don't do that. Let me tell you, what you do tonight isn't going to make any difference to these people at all. I guarantee you they're going to keep doing what they're doing. They talk about how much they contribute to their neighborhood. Has one of them, as Councilman Flynn's amendment would have suggested, gone around to their neighbors and said, is it okay if I do this? And if one of them said, no, say, okay, I care about you as a no, they don't. They only care about their own profit and they're going to keep doing what they're doing. And you know what? As much as I disrespect them, I'm more disappointed in you because it's your job to uphold the law. But you turn a blind eye. You know the enforcement mechanisms that are in this new thing. I don't know whether they're a farce, a joke, or a fantasy. And you know it, too. Nothing's going to change. You people have no problem enforcing the law against the homeless. You people have no problem enforcing the law in fighting against poor minority group members who can't afford property. These people testify over and over to the break in the law and you hold up your hands and say it's unenforceable. We can't do it. You know what you ought to do? You ought to do what you do best. Do nothing. Leave things exactly the way they are. Let it continue to be illegal. They're going to continue doing exactly what they're doing. But at least the upstanding residents of this city, when there are bad actors, could call and file a complaint. The only thing you're doing is giving these selfish, self minded people a legal defense to do what they're going to be doing anyway. Next we have George Burrows and George Burleson. George Brosnan, be this person I hear. Okay. I will call the next five cab. I'm sorry. George Burrows. And I'm sorry about that. George Burleson. Thank you for that correction. Next, Kevin Dickson. Cindy says Stretch, Clare Kelly, Steve Ramsey and Sarah McCarthy. So Kevin, is Kevin Dickson in the building? We have. No, no. Kevin Dickson. Okay. Next is Cindy Sestak. Good evening. I would like to start out. Oh, I'm Cindy Sastry from the Cheesman Park West End neighborhood. And I would like to start out thanking Mary Beth Sussman. Councilwoman Sussman, she had a very long and proper public process. Everyone got to talk. And I think we all understand both sides of the issue. I think we understand the neighborhoods as well as the people who need to make profit for various reasons. I do appreciate that the amendments that were put forth before we got here tonight didn't go through the public process and they didn't come forth . I think there's time to do that at a later time. Um, my. My neighbors in Cheesman Park West realize that we live in a very popular neighborhood. Everybody wants to live there. And by talking to all of them, the thing that they wanted me to most pronounce is that they want to live near their work. They don't want the housing stock, separate apartments, separate houses to be used by people who don't work and live in Denver. If you want to be a primary resident and rent out a part of your house, you are able to do that. So we all support the primary resident, but we do not like it when full units are used and people are not committed to this city. Those units should be safe for people so that we can reduce the environmental impact and all the other issues that happen with people who have to live outside of the city or far from their jobs. The residential zoning is the other part. This ordinance does keep residential zoning as residential and commercial is commercial. I also, when I travel, use short term rental platforms, VR, bio I have used for the most part. And recently when I was in Toronto, they did not have a primary residence regulation and they saw the repercussions of that, that they have venture capitalists that have 16 plus units and it's taking away and creating a shortage of housing. They are in the process of changing that right now. So we're starting out at a very good point. We don't have to deal with deleting and then regulation in the licensing. I think this is good. I would like to see very effective enforcement and the money put forth towards that necessitates. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you. Next we have Clare Kelly. Good evening, president and city council members. It's about nine 4845. I'm sure you all would much rather be at home. Thank you so much for staying late and listening to all of us. My name is Clare Kelly. I'm a Denver resident. I live at 1267 Josephine Street. And I am here to request that you consider a little bit of a fine tuning on this regulation. I support the bill that is in front of you all with the exception of the primary residency clause. I support short term rental of residential investment property within more densely populated neighborhood corridors that are currently zoned R three or greater or equivalent. And I believe that's the old zoning code. I absolutely believe that owners of a s t r business should be required to pay applicable hospitality, tax, meet or exceed safety requirements and hold applicable insurance. Short term rentals offer a unique product that differs from traditional hotels and motels. They offer a direct and closer connection to the community that people are visiting and to the cities, to the city's culture. They are a more affordable way to travel. And they they are a component of the sharing economy that is present world wide. As a third generation Denver native Verbio customer and residential, an investment property owner, I support a thoughtful rollout of the allowance of short term rentals beyond primary residences to encourage tourism. FOSTER The foster entrepreneurs on the entrepreneurs I've spoken to hear their businesspeople. They're entrepreneurs. They're not they're not evil. Am I evil? I don't think so. To place the primary residency clause with thoughtful restrictions that mirror the existing zoning regulations. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you, Steve Ramsay. Hello. I'll keep this short. I just wanted to bring a little personal perspective to this. I want to thank the City Council for taking the time and much effort to study these issues. I also particularly want to thank Mary Beth for getting the ball rolling. I'm Steve Ramsey, and I'm a Platt Park resident. I've been a Plat Park resident since 1987. I'm very pleased to be represented by John Clarke. Also grateful for both Mary Beth and Paul Cashman for taking time to discuss these issues with me over the time that this has. Been in play. So just very briefly, personally. I'm a small business man. I'm a self-employed commercial photographer. I have been for 30 years, and I strongly support the ordinance being proposed tonight. I've been an Airbnb host for about three years, and during that time, particularly being self-employed, the income that I received from that helped greatly in the last four or five years with the financial situation, which probably has affected just about everyone on some level. I can also tell you that income helps smooth out the financial ups and downs of being self-employed. And lastly, it's enabled me to spend some much needed time with my parents who are both in their late eighties. So it's been very much of a positive for me and the people that I have encountered being a host. And the whole process has been surprisingly enjoyable from top to bottom. So in closing, I just want to. Say the sharing economy is here to stay. Short term rentals are a part of that. And I believe common sense regulation makes that a positive part of any city, large and small worldwide, and particularly particularly in the amazing city of Denver, Colorado. I support the proposed legislation for licensing and regulating. Short term rentals. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Mr. Ramsey. Sarah McCarthy. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, and thank you to all the people who are here, both on this issue and a later issue that you still have to get to. Councilwoman Sussman, I think one sign of a good piece of legislation is that nobody likes it. And I think that's what is here tonight. Nobody really likes this. And I am one of those. And I have two concerns in particular that have been mentioned briefly, but I want to focus a little bit. One, I really think is the question of public policy in terms of what really do we mean by a residential neighborhood . And I think that allowing even the primary resident to have an STR in an R one zone is opening Pandora's box. And it's it's duplicitous on our part as a group to say this is a residential neighborhood. I noticed an advertisement not long ago that said that a a house was for sale and that you could earn $25,000 as a short term rental. I sure hope that that property is not paying residential property taxes because to me that's a commercial enterprise and should not be allowed in a residential zone. Change the zone if that's what you want, but not to mix as we are proposing to do tonight. My second area of concern has to do with enforcement. The enforcement that's proposed here is what is called permissive. This is what they can do in excise and license or in neighborhood inspection services. But there is nothing in that ordinance that I saw that. A short term rental owner shall do or there's nothing there that says that the city shall enforce. And I think Denver has an enforcement issue. And when I brought it up in years past, it is mentioned as a budget issue. But we're now putting together an ordinance that has a $25 licensing fee that will bring with it enforcement issues. And Denver isn't enforcing the ordinances it already has on the books, including short term rentals. No cease and desist orders have been issued yet. There's 2000 advertisements saying I intend to violate the ordinance. And the city says, I can't do anything about it. I disagree. The city can. Lots of ordinance like the night sky. Off street parking. Many different ordinances are not enforced. And I'm fearful this won't be enforced either. And I wish you luck in moving this forward. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Thank you, Miss McCarthy. Call the next five. Enrique, your last name got cut off. Marquesa, Mike, Social, Maine. Benedict and Billy Martin. Stacy near. So you five can make your way up to the front. And Enrique, you can begin your remarks. Hi. Good afternoon. Good evening. I think short term rentals are a great idea. Let's talk about it first. Neighborhoods are not owned by people. I hear a lot of people are getting up here and talking about. Their neighborhood and trying to protect their neighborhood. Their home is what they own. And if you own your home, you should be able to do what you want inside of that home. I don't use a home as a short term rental property, but I see the benefits of what it does to the community by people opening up their doors, sharing their environment. I do have businesses here, retail businesses. People on average spend $3 to every $1 when they travel. If you just have people staying in hotels in downtown Denver, then all you're doing is supporting national chains where everybody just goes outside of their hotel and goes to the Cheesecake Factory and the Olive Garden and all of those types of places. I want to try to spend my time developing business opportunities and businesses and employing, by the end of this year should be over 100 people in residential neighborhoods. And the guests that come from short term rentals in those residential neighborhoods are the people that are going to go to the businesses that I go and handcraft and make and take pride in. So everyone can have an opportunity to use them and to benefit from them. And I don't support the primary residence. I think it's too restrictive. And it also discourages people from coming in to Denver and bringing money in from other places. I do travel using Airbnb and VR bio and I think it enhances my experiences tremendously. And I would not go and rent a home for three or four days when the owner of the property was in the home. It just wouldn't make sense to me personally. Thank you very much for all of your time and I hope you make good decisions. Thank you. And sir, can you say your name for the record? Enrique Margulies. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Mike Social. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the Council. My name is Mike Socha. I live in beautiful Green Valley Ranch, so I'm part of Stacey Gilmore's district. And I, my husband, Matthew and I have. Been hosts for Airbnb for over two years now. And I have to say that we're pretty much exactly what you guys are proposing. We have a primary residence and we rent out the basement. We have been. Very happy with what we've done. And I just want to say that we think that it's really brought a sense of community with the type of person that we've brought into our home. We do live kind of out in the suburbs, and we've had a lot of people that have been moving to the city of Denver and they wanted some advice and they wanted to talk to people that have lived here that know the neighborhoods, etc., and kind of bounce off us what they wanted and what they were looking for. And we were we've been there to be able to talk. To them, talk them through things. We've also hosted people that have come from another country, and they won the green card lottery, which I didn't. Even know was a thing, honestly. And they came and they moved from Spain into our home for a. Large amount of time, and we got to help them, to help Americanize them to things. We got to have them try root beer floats for the first time. We got to try to go on the light rail for the first time. So we were really able to help them to get acquainted. They took care of our house as though it was their own. They absolutely adored our dog. They helped us a little bit by letting the dog out, etc. We were working late, so I want to say that we are very pro this legislation. We would eventually maybe like to sit on. The board that's going to be looking at additional legislation maybe for second secondary homes. But I think we need to start somewhere. I think there's a good place to start, and I think that we can kind of see how it goes from there because again, like everybody else said, we're not sure what this is going to actually do to the inventory. So once we have make that assessment, I think that we should take another look at it and maybe make amendments and and hopefully. Go from there. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Main Benedict. Members of council. Thank you very much for. The opportunity to speak tonight. My name is Marie Benedict's and I. Live in Denver. City in Council County. Sorry. So I have some serious concerns with the bill that's in front of you. Primarily, I am concerned that it will creates an economic incentive to remove properties from the market that would otherwise have been available as residential homes. And I think we all agree that affordable housing and housing. In general is a problem. For Denver. So to reduce supply and drive up pricing for the supply that's there, I think should cause some great concern. Certainly the primary resident requirement would be a minimum, I feel, in terms of safeguarding that. That doesn't happen to a greater. Extent that we can live with. And I would I would challenge you to see if there aren't other things that can be done to further reduce the impact on the available housing for actual residents. Some other people have spoken powerfully to the economic incentives here tonight for converting residences to rentals. Bessey did so, Joel as well. My other concern relates to enforcement and regulation. I am not convinced that the bill before you tonight has sufficient protections for neighbors and property owners. And I would again ask you to look carefully about what can be done to make sure that problems can be sorted out, that there are sufficient resources and sufficient rules in place that can be enforced in order to deal with bad actors. We heard a couple of people speak here tonight, I believe. Mr. May, I didn't catch his first name, spoke about it taking a year and a half to get a bad actor close down. Is this what neighbors are going to have to go through? Secondly, Charlie also spoke to neighbors becoming vigilantes. That's certainly not the life we want to lead. I feel as if what's before you tonight is a pretty fundamental decision. And I think we've heard sort of voices for both sides. Should neighborhoods be used to maximize profits and also to fill the city's coffers? What an exciting, positive argument. Or should neighborhoods be available as housing for our many residents who need to live in Denver close to work, close to where their families are, and be available to folks of all income levels. So I urge you to think very carefully about that tonight and see what you can do to make the neighborhood protect protections even stronger. And I leave you with the words from the gentleman from CPD who quoted from Blueprint Denver and said, an enforceable standards should not be clear to be included in the zoning code. So thank you for your time and please be thoughtful tonight. And did I. Say that my name is Marie Benedict's? I did. Otherwise you would ask me. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Amberly Martin. Hi. I'm Emily Martin, and I live in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Denver. I actually just recently moved to this neighborhood and previously lived in central business district. Just a little bit about my background. Many of you have actually heard my husband's side of the story, and unfortunately he couldn't be here today because he is actually out for National Guard duty. So I'm here to tell you about my side of the story and why I think we should vote for this amendment. So a little bit about me. I'm also a veteran of the Colorado National Guard, and now I get to serve as a military spouse when he's gone. During this time, it's really hard for us to supplement our income when he's getting paid by the military. And so we've used Airbnb to do that for us. Like he has gone this week. I was able to have somebody come into my home and stay with me and get to enjoy their company and have somebody there that I can share dinner with and really get to know. It's been pretty wonderful having the guests that we do and having the opportunities that we've been given by doing Airbnb. I know there are some concerns brought up about short term rentals, even with primary residents, with our kids in our neighborhoods. And I want to tell you about what I do because of this supplemental income that I get. I get time to volunteer during the day in my local schools. So I get to go in and read to kids in my neighborhood. There's a school across the street from me that I get to go in and get to know my my neighborhood children. And I'm really excited about being able to, in the future, have my kids attend Denver public schools. I think they're it's a wonderful school district. And I want to be able to stay in the neighborhood where I am so that my family can grow there, too. And that wouldn't be possible without this supplemental income that we get from Airbnb. Another part of it is that we also do travel quite a bit and it's been wonderful that we can rent out our full home at this time while we travel. So we actually do have people that come whole, families that will come and stay at our home while we're gone and we all. And then we rent out our second bedroom when we are home. A few of our guests that we have had. Like I said, we have somebody that's staying with us right now. Also a military veteran, a West Point grad who is moving to Denver and he's checking out neighborhoods and trying them out. We've had a park ranger from England and we've had a wicked Elphaba. Stay with us. When Wicked was in town. So if anybody is a musical fan, she was with us, too. So I just want to tell you about all of our great guests that we've had and what it does for us as a military family in the Denver community. Thank you, Stacy Near. Stacey near and chambers. All right. We'll go to the next five. Sheila Hibbert, Michael Leventhal, Gary Mason, Ling McPhail and Alison Ott. Good evening. My name is Shallow Habits and I founded the Denver Short Term Rental Alliance over a year ago to give non primary residency homeowners, local businesses and citizens a voice within the last year. We have provided the following evidence and facts to the City Council, a due study provided by three esteemed professors, which estimates $2 million in tax revenue and $21 million in ancillary spending from short term rental renters per year. These figures are based solely on non primary residency rentals. We attended all four community town halls where proponents of eliminating the primary residency requirement outnumbered opponents 3 to 1. We conducted a Denver specific poll which showed that 70% of residents support regulating both primary and nine non primary residency residency rentals. We provided a legal document outlining the potential property rights infringements. If the bill is approved as it stands. We have sent hundreds of letters to the city council. We have dispel the myth that non primary residency rentals impact affordable housing. Non primary residency rentals represent 0.1% of residential homes in Denver. They are not impacting affordable housing. And just today we delivered a petition with 894 signatures urging that the city council regulate all short term rentals. The Denver Short Term Rental Alliance is extremely disappointed that despite the facts and evidence, the proposed short term rental regulation remains unchanged. The current regulation is based on a vocal, fear based minority, most of whom have not been negatively impacted by short term rentals. The city will set a dangerous precedent if they ignore the facts in favor of appeasing an unknown the unsubstantiated fears of a few. We once again urge that the Denver City Council examine the facts and apply them to the regulations and offer a compromise amendment which fairly regulates all short term rentals in Denver. Thank you. Thank you. And we thank you, Michael Leventhal. Michael Leventhal not in the building. Gary Mason. Hi. I'm Gary Mason. I live in the Highlands neighborhood at near the intersection of Perry and 29th Street. I'm up here just to really share why I think Airbnb is a boon to Denver and my neighborhood. I just wanted to point out that what makes Airbnb special? Many people have talked about the economic benefits, and they're certainly there, I think, not only for the city but also for the homeowner. I've since doing Airbnb for about a year. I've had the resources to make a number of considerable improvements to my home. But more importantly, what I really wanted to. Share about. Is the. Human experience, which actually surprised. Me. I'd had a long term tenant stay in my place. I was looking to get someone else and someone said, Well, try Airbnb. And I thought it was going to be strange having guests in my into my house. But what I discovered was just a. Dramatic shift. In the quality of human experience in relating to people and dealing with. People. First of all, the quality of people I have staying at my place are exceptionally quite varied. Not simply millennials, as some people seem to imply. I've had people from 20 up to 80 years of age. I've had biotech entrepreneurs, young married couples, professors, nurses, lots of parents visiting their sons or daughters who live nearby, often with grandkids, artists, a fire chief financial managers. State director for. Steinway Pianos, medevac military pilots, retired engineers. People moving to. Denver and needing a place as a base camp before they move. And but what is truly special about what it is that represents a. New. Way of socializing? I was surprised how many of these people have become personal friends of mine. I've been to their houses for meals. They've been to mine. I've had them over to parties. Cocktail parties were not only have they met each other, new people who are moving to town, but they've met friends of mine. Many of them have asked me to, you know, stay. I have a couple in Amsterdam. They want me to come stay with them. This is part of an. Emerging way of socializing. That I think is different. From what our neighborhoods have been in. The past. In other words, part of what. I'm getting at is when people come stay at these short term rentals, they are, but they are. Distinctly not hotel. Experiences, nothing like that at all. It's completely something very different. I think people have experienced that one to some extent. When they have Uber, drivers ride an Uber. It's a little bit of a different experience from being with a cab driver. It's even much more so that when you have somebody stay at your house, when you have them share with you about their experiences during the day, I might say that their experience in the neighborhood is not that of some somebody simply as a hotel guest. They're walking through the neighborhood relating to my neighbors. They say hello to them as as neighbors. And so, all in all, I think it's a human experience. It's not simply an option to make more money. It is part of the new way we'll be relating to people in the future. Mr.. You sound a lot of barriers, so. Your 3 minutes are up. I see. Thanks. Thank you. Lane McPhail. Good evening. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to everybody. I am my husband and my name is Ling MacPhail and my husband and I live at 1530 Locust Street. We're permanent residents there and we rent our basement out as an Airbnb. We have i. I, my son joined the Air Force in a couple of years back and we the same day I lost my job. So we ended up having to figure out what we were going to do with our economy. My husband is a forklift operator and I am an artist. So we we we decided to try Airbnb. It helped us save our our, you know, we were able to stay in our house and and we were also able to then rent that same house out or rent that same house out, which helped us pay our mortgage . But we also were able to keep my son lodgings when he came home on leave. We also did some. We also tried out Airbnb before we decided to do it. We thought, Well, let's just take a look. So we actually flew to San Antonio to watch him graduate from boot camp and we stayed in an Airbnb. And I want to just say that we take very much pride in our and our lodging, and we are not partiers and we don't enjoy people who like to party staying with us. And we put that in our lot in our listing. We're very. We've never had any guests that were disrespectful. I mean, there were always we have house rules. And we were very adamant about certain things, and nobody's ever argued with us about that. In fact, we've had people come from Paris and like this one lady came from Paris with her, her niece. She didn't speak any English. We use Google Translate to communicate. She was delightful. And we she ended up but after she left, we met her cousin, who is a neighbor who lives about five blocks away. I never would have met that man, but now we greet each other in the supermarket. And that same lady had sent us Christmas cards, a sweater, a coffee mug, you know, just really sweet thing. I would never in these broken English letters that we just adore. So those are the kinds of gifts that we have had that we've totally enjoyed. We've had lots of guests. I make apparently I make mean scones. People like my scones. They write about them on my reviews. And it's actually made me think about maybe I should start a cottage, cottage industry selling scones. It's not impossible. I have to look into it. But I mean, so there's not Steve wasn't the act, but I'm definitely starting to think about other ideas that are, you know, that are that could be important and helpful in any way. Our our lives are better because of Airbnb. It's opened our minds and it's open and we're really glad that we've opened our doors things. Thank you. Alison Alt. Hi. Thank you. My name is Allison Ault and I own in the low, high neighborhood. I moved out of my small 750 square foot, one bedroom, one bathroom home, because as a single woman at the time, I lost my job and I could not afford the mortgage. I rented the home to full time renters for two years. In between, renters spent thousands of dollars and weeks of my time to get the home back into pristine condition. Frustrated, I saw Airbnb as a solution. I took it alone to furnish the house with new furniture and made improvements like an exposed brick wall and landscaping. I'm not just a host. I'm a super host. And in six months, I have garnered over 65 star reviews. And my property has been featured in a New York magazine as one of the best Airbnbs in Denver. I'm passionate about operating my short term rental, and I'm personable with my guests as well as my neighbors. I live ten blocks away from the property and I'm and am available should there be an issue. In contrast, I have friends who are also my neighbors who own a new Bell townhome five blocks away. They have been living in California for a year and renting to gas through Airbnb. The six person property has hosted rappers, bachelor parties and hosted fun overnighters. My guests are nurses, doctors, families, visiting other family members, business people, and couples celebrating their anniversary. I don't understand how the primary residence rule protects my neighborhood by putting me a passionate and available host out of business. My local property is part of my retirement portfolio. I can rent it to full time renters and make a little bit of money to fix it up between tenants and pay the rising taxes. But with the opportunity I have with Airbnb, my cute little home, one of the best in Denver is my retirement. I support the bill being discussed today, but not the primary residence rule. Please consider the impact this blanket rule will actually have. I don't doubt that there are irresponsible hosts as six complaints and a few vocal people have presented. But please don't punish people like me who improve the street and add to the richness of my neighborhood and local businesses. The primary residence rule does not fit the perceived fears or does not fix the perceived fears of short term rentals. Also on another note, a few people have argued about the inventory and a couple of years ago the Denver Post published something on the construction defect law. And before that was passed, the condo market made up 25% of all housing in Denver and by 2014 dwindled down to 3.5%. Our primary non primary residents, short term rentals are less than 1% and so I feel like the council's efforts would make a bigger impact elsewhere. Thinking of salt, I am calling the last three speakers up and Elizabeth Gurley Grant and Kim Knight's. And I see Miss Elizabeth. Coming up. Is Gerty Grant, and you know she's okay. You could take her. Hi, I'm an Elizabeth Global and I appreciate the opportunity to address the council. I would like first of all to ask the council to suspend the statistical. Let's just agree that there's lots of people that have anecdotally documented the benefits, the shortcomings, the dangers, etc., and make this decision as comprehensive as understanding a city is an organism . And managing economic diversification is an important thing to do to help the net income of families increase, especially in neighborhoods where people need to hang on to their property as the cost of living goes up for some of the right reasons, some of the less caring reasons, I'd like us to be in a world class city where everyone matters. But I'd like to add the word equally to that. As a city, I would like for the people that, bless your hearts, have worked hard and do great Airbnbs too. I should tell you I'm supporting this, but with the home, with. With the principal residence. Just so you're clear where I'm coming from, folks who who have had the benefit of, you know, maybe doing a great job, I'm sorry, but enforcement is an important thing. And I think there are three classifications primary residence stars, absentee return on invest in return on investment centric investors, which are the danger and the neighborhood proximity entrepreneurs that have been in sort of a grace period. And I appreciate the this country was started because somebody broke some laws and that's sometimes how innovation comes. But we need to have some kind of regulation that honors the sovereign wealth of the property owner, but also doesn't open the gateway for people that are also owners that could come in before we understand what the full potential of the inventory of our diverse housing needs and and creative use of our spaces can be as we solve problems. I would like OED and human resources and social the humane social services to enter into this to offer subsidies to folks that have short term rentals to help with transitional housing and provide even even power up instead of an advisory committee. I'd love it to the short term rental advisory committee. Let's call it the Commission on Short Term Policy, Housing, Housing, Enterprise, Ethics and enhance its authority. Let's be holistic about this. I feel fine about giving folks an opportunity to use their property as they see fit. But civilization is not is a combination of private rights of all types, as well as a common good and a vision. An economic vision can be well served by using the gray areas in a way where you do it with equity. If we're going to tax, I believe in taxes when there's an infrastructure of a city that needs to be supported. But let's give tax breaks here relative to a constructive relationship between individual economy and helping mentor people out of dark economies into a diverse economy in their homes. These and one last thing. Don't call me xenophobe. Don't call me reactionary. I'm thoughtful president and we know how to do those labels. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. Gerty Grant. Good evening, counsel. My name is Gertrude Grant. I live at 242 South Lincoln Street, Denver, Colorado. And I want to thank Mary Beth Susman for her diligent efforts in crafting this ordinance. With the help of a lot of involved people, I reluctantly support Council Bill 261 as it stands reluctant because the current situation is untenable and unenforceable . I would like to make two points. I am a landlady of four property and I'm not much of a lady, but I do on some property. Four properties, including an apartment in the house where I live. I hear people saying that because having long term rentals is fraught with bad experience, that they should be allowed to turn those properties into short term rentals. As the landlord of 35 years, I suggest that you need to develop skills in order to be a successful land owner. I offer well-maintained, good value homes that attract many applicants, allowing me to select responsible tenants who are likely to stay in place for multiple years and be good neighbors. My current five tenants have been with me for from 3 to 20 years and it is a pleasure to have them in my neighborhood. My second point is and concern is that short term rentals have already turned houses in my residential neighborhood in the weekend. Destination resorts. Why? Because of our beautiful city, our wonderful climate and increasingly robust entertainment district like South Broadway and the limitations on where marijuana can be smoked. I just want you to see what was on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Travel Magazine three weekends ago. It says Colorado, the promised land of pot, the mile high state. In our neighborhood. We had one property that was only one of. Four owned by a Florida investor who advertised it as cannabis friendly. The neighbors reported it as a disruptive, smelly, short term rental. That. Finally was shut down by the Board of Adjustment Zoning. There are other properties in our neighborhood that Charlie Bush has testified. To that have become weekend party. Houses. Well, any long term neighbor can be a weekend party person. One has a chance to work out respectful relationships over time, get law enforcement and zoning involved if. Necessary, but with different tenants every weekend. And nonresident dissident landowners solving their differences in lifestyles is not impossible. I urge you to pass the current ordinance with the primary residents intact. But I also would ask you to please. Please, when you're developing. The next budget, Mr.. Miss Grant. Adequate personnel to enforce it. Thank you. Thank you. And. And. Our last speaker is Kim Knight. Hello, I'm Kim Titus and I live at 1013 East 26th Avenue and this is in the five points area and I'm brand. New to the Airbnb. I just have my first visitor right now this week. And so I'm surprised to hear that this has been a conversation for two years. And I guess what I'm hoping is, is that we can vote on this and pass the ordinance for primary residents. I also would like to, in the future be able to approve maybe a second home. But at the in the meantime, I think having the ability to make a decision today would be in the best interest for the city of Denver. I think that is going to improve the economy as far as local economy in the neighborhood, for the local coffee shops, the restaurants, the breweries. My tenant that's here for the week is here for a wedding. And next week my second tenant will be here for the Bob Dylan concert. So I'm going to have a variety of people here visiting. And I also am supporting the cleaning ladies or men, whoever, as far as local economy and helping pay individuals in the city. And last but not least, I think it allows for homeowners to be able to subsidize their income. And I hope you approve the audience. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes our speakers. We will now go to questions of members of council and I will ring first. Joel Noble. Angel we had I think he had two or three points. You were ninth and I was writing down and you said not knowing who lives there. Housing crisis. Did you have a third point or was it just those two? Well, during during that part of my comments, I was contrasting the points that I expected to be made from neighbors who are motivated by not knowing who's there. So if there were noise concerns or trash concerns, they wouldn't know how to talk, who to talk to. And while those are valid, they're sort of limited, because if codes are being broken, there's ways to address that. On the other hand, people who own multiple houses have interests as well. And while you can understand those interests, in the end, I think the point that needs to be looked at most strongly in making this decision has to do with the affordability crisis. Yeah. Thank you. And so I wanted to allow you the opportunity for those who said that the .01 percent is such a minimal impact. I wanted and I know you brought up the affordable housing piece. I wanted to allow you the opportunity to just to speak to that briefly. Oh, certainly. I'm not aware of good analytic studies, and I've not presenting myself as an expert on this. What I've read is fairly persuasive about areas that have allowed short term rentals without any limitations. Those portions of those cities accelerating in rent prices far beyond other parts of the cities. And it's intuitive, although anecdotal. We've heard about places in Denver where our investors, whether they're local investors or outside investors, have taken formerly regular long term rentals and turned them into short term rentals. So from a from a supply perspective, reducing the supply of housing is the last thing we should be doing when we're in this housing crisis. Great. Thank you. Shane Brady. Shane still here? Did she leave? She left. Margie. Margie mendez. And Margie, are you coming up? I'll go ahead and ask a question just for the sake of time. You know, you're on the zoning and planning and you were talking about how obviously you represent many voices and how there was a strong support of the primary resident peace. And I was wondering if you just could briefly expound on why you feel so many different neighborhoods feel that is so important. Like what is if you could if you could some. Like, what's what's the main reason for that? Yes. If you could just I couldn't hear you when I was walking up, but if. Sure. Yeah. If you can just once again, just you mentioned in your comments how the primary residence was like a huge sticking point for the people in support of this for Zapp. And I was just wanting if you could just kind of give expound a little bit why that primary residence piece you feel is so important in this audience? We felt that the primary residency requirement was without that, it turns the residential neighborhoods into commercialized areas. And we had a very many of our members. Tell us about the horror stories that you've heard, some of which tonight. And we felt that with the primary residency requirement, at least there would be someone in the property that a neighbor could go knock on the door and say, okay, you know, you're having a party over here, it's got to cease. And so the the issue was and another thing that we had I'm sorry. Another thing that we had is all of the complaints that the zoning and planning committee has heard has all been from out of the area owners, multiple properties or those kind of things. So we felt that with the primary residency requirement that would protect the neighborhoods and also allow a owner to have someone in their home. Great. Thank you. If I can just paraphrase the ability for neighbors to know who they can hold accountable. If there's an issue with the short term rent on, if they no need to know who they can go to, I go knock on the door. I need to go to talk to this individual about that. That's correct. Perfect. Thank you. Nate. Nathan, you want to come up? I just want to afford you the opportunity to talk about the enforcement piece. There was a I'll use a house of Cards reference that it's if you could just quickly speak to that, I want to give you just a time to talk about that enforcement approach. And I don't I don't know if it's possible to put up our slide here again, but I think we've heard a lot of concerns about the the existing framework of enforcement and a lot of short term rentals have taken years, months to be enforced through the existing zoning code. It's our hope and it's our intent that our business licensing enforcement framework will make that much more effective, efficient and robust. So these tools right here are all the tools that we have at our disposal from a business licensing perspective to gain compliance. It can be anywhere from just a simple notice to comply. We can do licensee audits of their information. We can do licenses, spot checks, which includes both web monitoring and in-person inspections and investigations. We can also suspend a short term roll license. We can issue general violations or fines of up to $990 per incident. And finally, we can do a show cause hearing to revoke that license. None of this exists in the current zoning code today. And by taking the licensees and putting them to a business licensing standard, we have all these tools at our disposal to enforce the network. Great. Thank you. And last question that I have, Nathan, for you. The the short term rental task force that you should this partial implement timeline wise. And certainly I'm not holding you this, but ballpark, if you all felt any type of amendments to this would be required after some. What's the time period you're looking at reviewing before taking another look at it and maybe we could change this? I mean, what's that time period? You know, I. Don't think I have a firm timeline at this point. I think that's really a discussion for that advisory committee to a timeline that makes sense to them. We're hoping that we can get this short term rental advisory committee up and running off the ground late this summer, early this fall. And really the work that's put into this advisory committee through community members, through neighbors, through licensees and host, that'll sort of dictate that that timeline, what that looks at. So I don't think I have a firm timeline for you right now, but we are committed to get that end of that advisory committee up and running as soon as possible. Great. Thank you. Those are all my questions. Councilman Flynn, you're up. Thank you, Mr. President. Is Mike Socha still here? Sucka? No. And Ling McPhail. She's still here. Do you want her scones? That was. That was about. You. Okay. Both wing. Actually, I looked up her listing here on Airbnb while she was talking, and Mike Socha both talked about renting out their basements. And I was trying to find out. What I wanted to find out is whether these basements are in the way of an accessory dwelling unit, which is illegal in a single family zone, at least where they operate. And I brought this on first reading. I brought this up as well. So I wanted to know if they had a kitchen in there, which would but they do have locked entrances and I don't know if they have fire egress windows. So no. Does anyone else here who testified it ran out their basement. Sir. Okay. Can I ask you to come up? Is there a kitchen in there as well? Is there outside entrance and blocked entrance? No, it is simply a master bedroom suite. My guests use my kitchen. Okay. And the stairs can't get into my. Okay. Thank you. That would be legal. Other than the fact. Other than the fact that short term running isn't currently legal. Thank you, Mr. Brown. As you know, I have a concern about hosts taking it upon themselves to do these renovations. Nathan. How? Let me see. Where do I have you? How do you how will you verify through an online application process? How do you plan to verify primary residency? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that there was a comment that came up in terms of one scenario potentially being legal or another scenario not being legal in terms of their primary residence circumstance. So for example, in our ordinance, under our definitions section, we have a primary residence means a residence which is the usual place of return for housing, as documented by at least these several documents here, but that we're not limited by just those documents that are spelled in ordinance. The director has the authority to investigate further on whether there's evidence or testimony that that place is not the normal or usual place of return. We can still enforce that. Is she going to do that personally for every every. Applicant. Except when she's on maternity leave? I remember the difficult time that the city had enforcing the residency rule when we required city workers to live in the city. And it was it was a nightmare to try to look into that. So how I'm not asking how are they going to demonstrate that they're a primary residence, but how will we know that? How will we know that that's truthful. So just by going in and obtaining a license through our online licensing system, you will certify that the unit you're offering out is your primary residence. If we find that you falsified that information or it's not, your primary residence will then take it. But we're not going to check it. We're not going to check documents up front. And the reason for this is we want to make sure we have as high rate as a compliance. We want to have as much of the population in the pools per se. So I would I would point out that that's not compliant, though. If they're not a primary resident, how will we find out whether any of these short term rental units are accessory dwelling units that have been constructed outside of our building and fire codes? And I might call Ann Arbor's our planner to help us with that response there. Thank you, Councilman. So that would also be upon investigation. And so you will certify in the licensing process that you meet all applicable city regulations, which means you're certifying that your ADU is legal, if that's what. Your Honor system. You're using. The honor system kind of like kind of like fare checking on light rail. When when a complaint comes in, there's the follow up investigation. Nathan. For this new and robust enforcement division where the short term rental division, the unfortunately nicknamed EST heard how many additional staff people are we going to hire for for this new robust enforcement. Right. So the way we're thinking of this is that our access and licenses department has six inspectors, will dedicate 2 to 3 inspectors that will prioritize on short term rental enforcement. But at the same time, this agency can actually partner with all the resources that we have today with our partner agencies. And so that's why we're able to actually work and coordinate with the current amount of nice inspectors, environmental health inspectors, DPD 301 to really have that robust network of resources to enforce the not only our licensing ordinance, but as well as those common neighborhood complaints that people make. On being so nice. That's part of CPD. That's not part of exercises license. Correct. But we can work with them. So when I'm looking at the toolbox here in the Slide on Enforcement Partnership. Most of this seems reactive. We are not actually going to verify that any of this is accurate. But we can absolutely do proactive compliance monitoring. So our short term rental inspectors can monitor websites, monitor the ads, make sure you have that license number in your advertisements. We can also audit the information provided by the licensees. We can audit we can do spot checks in spot check. Right. Right. So so no actual enforcement at the or checking at the time of application. Again, the application process is that certification under penalty of perjury similar to how you renew your driver's license online today, you're certifying that you meet these particular legal requirements. If we find that you falsified that information, we'll take action on your license. Thank you, Abe. On slide three, one of the purpose of of the text amendment on slide three was it said, recognize the growing popularity of short term rentals while providing protections for neighborhoods. Can you tell me how this protects neighborhoods? Because I've been trying to amend this endlessly for a couple of months to protect neighborhoods and been turned down. Sure. Well, yeah. You've heard a lot tonight about the growing popularity of short term rentals and and why residents are choosing to conduct short term rentals. And so that's what we're we're trying to acknowledge. On the other hand, the providing protections. That is this whole framework that we're that we're talking about tonight, that we have a better tracking and enforcement system. And I think, you know, Nathan mentioned this briefly, but one thing I really want to emphasize is that you'll see in the licensing ordinance that provision regarding the fact that it shall be illegal to advertise a short term rental without a license. That's something we can't enforce on now. It's not illegal to advertise, only to do it. Which means we're investigating. Mm hmm. In the future, if this ordinance were enacted. We have the ability to sit at the computer and see which ones are not licensed, send them a warning. Ultimately begin to find them without even necessarily visiting the property. Will you check the numbers, the license number, the registration number to see if it's a valid number and that I haven't just made up a number that mimics an actual number. We will do. That. Yeah. Okay. So that's how we're protecting residents, big neighbor. And then, of course, you know, we want the streamlined process to get registered, as Nathan has described, that includes the self-certification, but that then brings that short term rental into the system. And then when the police receive noise complaints, other things happen. We can share that information. We've got that short term rental license number attached to a property. That information is now attached to that short term rental for purposes of license renewal or other sanctions against the short term rental. Okay. We we're not going require a zoning permit for this. We're going to have a business license. We have a host of home occupations in our zoning code, including rooming house, which this seems to be except for less than 30 days. If the streamlined approach promotes greater compliance. Why don't we drop the requirement for all home occupations and streamline it for them as well? Well, as I mentioned in my earlier presentation that other home occupations, with the exception of like a large childcare center. Or food preparation. Food preparation, also. Requiring a business license. Mm hmm. Right. So. But most do not. Like, if you're operating a home office, you don't have to go to Stacie to get a to get a business license. And we discuss this at council committee at the Neighborhoods and Planning Committee. And. There was a you know, there's a lot of discussion of like, why are we making you go to two different departments to get legal? That's just a recipe for low compliance. Let's focus on one part of the system. And in this case, it's the business licensing to encourage compliance. The requirements that apply to short term rentals include many similar limitations that exist for home occupations. Now, in terms of like not showing external evidence of the use and, you know, only having a very limited allowance for signage and that sort of thing. And finally, we have some some other home occupations in residential areas that are not uniform across all residential districts. Sometimes I find that we want uniformity when that's the outcome we want. But when we talk about the uniqueness of each neighborhood, when we want to emphasize the differences among our neighborhoods. So cottage food sales is not a permitted home occupation or use in some residential zones. Did we ever look at not making short term renting allowable in all residential districts? But maybe, for instance, I noticed that the map, the map that I want to show later where it shows all the listings as of January. Where they don't exist, for instance, in my district. Those are the zones that are suburban context. Did we ever look at the task force or the group ever look at having short term rentals in those residential districts that are urban edge or whatever and not in suburban yards where they don't seem to be very popular anyway? Right. So you mentioned zone districts where some home occupations are not permitted. There are a couple of specialized zone districts in the suburban context and exist in very few parts of the city. Primarily, it's right southwest Denver. And so we did think about that because there is a precedent for treating at least those limited areas a little bit differently. And we thought about the context system, which gives us the ability to say, treat all of the suburban neighborhood context zone districts differently. However, throughout the process, we didn't specifically hear people saying that the impacts of short term rentals would be greater in those contacts than in, say, the contexts where they're concentrated towards the center of the city. Maybe if there have been a town hall meeting closer than South High School, you might have heard that. Do you think? Well, yeah. Okay. I've heard we've spoken before that. That you feel that we didn't go as far afield as we should have with the outreach. Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. Councilwoman Sussman. Thank you, Mr. President. I have. A question. Is Marc still here? Who was spoke first about an apartment in a high rise downtown? Yes. He is not here. He's not here. Yeah. And Craig Ellsworth, um, uh, they began ask you this. Did did you say, Craig, that you had a place that had a business license and a tax license? Yes. As a short term rental. When I contacted the city about getting a business license. I said I was operating. A short term rental and I inquired about getting a lodgers tax I.D. and I indicated that it would also be a short term rental. Even asked. Tax and license if I needed to. Collect taxes on all. Of the amount or just the rental amount, the other amounts being cleaning and booking fees and all further out that my business name and email include, among other things, we are below. It's very clear what I'm doing. So even the city doesn't know that. This is illegal. Except that you could possibly be in a zone that is called a mixed use zone that does allow for short term rentals if you get a lodging license and a tax license. And in fact, that's why I wanted to call you up and wanted to call markup down downtown areas and some other mixed use zone areas. You can do this. You can already do a short term rental in certain mixed use zones if you get a lodgers license and a tax license. So it might very well be that you're doing it legally. I doubt. That. I get that very much based on where I live. Yeah, that's right. I live I live on East 10th Avenue in Downey. It is a residential neighborhood. So I am sure that what I am doing now is illegal. Hmm. We'd have to take it. We'd have to take a look at that. But that's very interesting. Thank you very much. I just want to let people know that there were some zones in the city where it's legal. If you have someone had mentioned stay Alfred to and and what they they they get lodging license and things. The other question. Oh, the other no comment. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman Sussman. Councilman. Yeah, thank you, Mr. President. Councilman Cashman and I, we had a good meeting with Natan. And who else? I think everybody on Friday. You talked about it, and and Councilman Cash and I were trying to propose amendment to specify an increased staffing for this programing. And Mr. Rodwell cautioned us that we were stepping on sacred executive ground and so we had to back off and we had a good discussion about rules and regs and that's where you convinced us that the rules and regs are going to be, what's going to really enforce this program, come up and talk about rules and regs and how you're going to strengthen this enforcement process with those rules and regs. Correct. So just like any other city department, access licenses has the ability to promulgate additional rules and regulations as it pertains to the ordinance. What we're really excited about is having a a more of a community based conversation with the short term rental advisory committee to look at our enforcement efforts, to look at our enforcement tools, to look at our fines, schedules in the cooperation with the city agencies, and potentially promulgate those additional rules through a similar public hearing process through our department, which is consistent with any other departments, with their promulgation of rules to continue to hone and sharpen and improve our enforcement network. So the ordinance before you today really gives us that barebones framework and we'll be able to move forward with community input on how we can continue to enforce the sharp in our framework as well. So we don't really give specifics like like we really want. Let's talk about two examples tonight. Is Mary Lou still here, merely described to your situation on enforcement, whether on Steel Street there and the difficulty we've had with that situation? I made a written. Complaint to Neighborhood Inspection Services about 800 Steel Street and specified that it was on Airbnb and then sends in a mandatory complaint to specify that it was also on fee or below. I was told an inspector would go out to the house. It's my understanding that an inspector did go out of the house and left some kind of a notice. I don't know anything more about that, but I have heard nothing since and they continue to have crowds going through that house. Let's take this example and let's talk about rules and regular houses going to hell, Mary Lou, and how is this going to address this problem? Absolutely. So I think the frustration that you may have witnessed now is because our existing zoning code doesn't have necessarily these business licensing tools. So take this example of this residential house in this area. One of the first things we would do to see is if they're licensed. So we would look up the location, see if I have a license for that. Look at the advertisement and see if there's a license number in that advertisement. Let's say there's not an advertisement in that license number where you could use a series of tracking the the advertisement in combination with Google Maps, in combination with the Denver Assessor's records to identify who that property owner is. And then go ahead and cite the property owner for not having a license or operating without a license. If they do have a license and they have that license number on their advertisement. We would then investigate whether or not it's their primary residence. We would ask for documentation or really investigate that that place of a usual return to make sure it really is their primary residence. And then we can also investigate further it to make sure that they have the the appropriate insurance, the appropriate rental package, the appropriate safety features, and do a really complete audit of that actual unit to make sure it's in compliance. What about what about the 16 people? Okay. Say it is primary residence and they get 16 people stay in there. How is the word is going to address that? Right. And I made a for a a little bit of fun on this. But essentially, if there's if there if a licensee or of a unit is in violation of any local building code or any local ordinances, we could still take action on the license. And I don't know if you wanted to talk a little more about. But the audit says you can only rent one room. Right. The ordinance states that you can rent just simply your primary residence. So it can be the primary structure, it can be the accessory dwelling unit. It could be both, but only limited to one contract or one party at a time. If you have five bedrooms, you can rent off bedrooms to a family. As long as it's under one rental. One contract. Okay, let's talk about Charlie and you and I had to. But let's talk about Charlie's example, about her situation over there on Lincoln Street where you got two properties like that. What's what how are you going to help with Ms.. Bush's example there? The first thing we would do is look at the DVD logs. So we would look at the calls that are coming in and we would look at any disturbing the peace calls that came in with with DVD. And we could absolutely take action on the license if there was that egregious party calls that come in and disturbing the peace calls that come in, we can we can start taking action on the license. Additionally, we would make sure that they are licensed. We would make sure it's their primary residence and that they fulfilled all the requirements of the audience. And if they don't if they don't have a license and they're not primary residence, are you going to take immediate action to to take care of that situation? Yeah, I think a lot of it does depend on a case by case basis. So we have a lot of tools, whether not be just a notice to comply. But we have that flexibility. We have that authority for those really egregious hosts to start issuing those dual violation fines up to $909 per incident. So that includes just a day of advertising unit online. Well, I think everyone here is just encouraging you to be to enforce the law if we're going to pass a law and because the police don't decide which laws they're going to enforce and building department and decide which permits are going to give out. And, you know, we you know, we expect, you know, the excise in license to go ahead and manage this very well and make sure lawfully handled so. Absolutely. And like I said earlier, thankfully, the the business license tools that we have, these are tools that we've been employing for decades. And it's something that we're very used to and we'll apply these same standards to these licensees. So say district and I've probably got this many rental apartments and as anybody else and tell me how you're going to enforce the rental units there. That's the big issue that I'm concerned to correct. The the multifamily join units may be a challenge. And I think in these certain circumstances, each of these property management companies, neighbors, residents are really going to be our best allies to give us the information. And especially if it's complaint based, we can actually work with these property managers, work with these agencies and work with these residents in these multifamily buildings to enforce the same law. And so we really feel that neighbors and residents in these multifamily drawings are our best allies or best partners. So if neighborhoods are always gave you a list of the approved apartments that are eligible for rent, and that would help you out from. Any information that is. And property management companies can give us as it relates to licensed or unlicensed short term rentals will always be helpful to the department. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr.. Thank you, Councilman. New Councilman Cashman. Thank you, Mr. President. I need to take a little bit of issue with my brother down at the end. Councilman new in that I don't think either one of us were convinced by our discussion the other day. My memory of it is you asked very strongly for rules from specification on rules and regulations, and I'm not here in that. And I asked very specifically for a change in language on my concern about games being played with the primary residence, which as I read it says very specifically as documented by these particular listings. Now, Nathan, you told me earlier today that our city attorney says that the language in the ordinance gives us all the protection we need, so that if somebody comes to us, sends us a driver's license that says indicates its primary residence, but it's not that we can go further. So I'm going to ask Mr. City attorney, if you can give me clarification on this. Thank you, Matt. Madam City Attorney, please. Our definition of primary residence is broad enough to include miss loves the opportunity to go in further and delving further into what actually provides evidence for a primary residence. So it's not just the documents that we listed, but also your usual place of return. And so the director does have the opportunity to go in further and to figure out what a usual place of return is. What gives us that specifically? Because as I read the ordinance being proposed. And I am not an attorney and I'm not trying to be rude, but I think this is important. So as I read the bill, it says primary residents as documented by. And I think in our initial application, those documents support the primary residency, but it doesn't end the analysis there and the director does have the power. To go in. And where is the definition, the definition being regular place of return or. That's correct. So that's what a short term renter or property owner needs to prove. That their primary residence is their usual place of return. Okay, so. I'm not really sure why we're asking for documents. But I think that's an easy tool for us to look at at least two documents that provide proof of that. But if we need to go further, if we need to investigate, okay, we have the ability to do that. Okay. Could you thank you for that. I'm sorry. Could you say your name for the record, please? Collymore. Thank you. Thank you. So if Nathan compare for me a bit more, why the complexity in our current situation where these illegal businesses are difficult to put out of business? Because all we have going for us is the zoning code in. If we pass this ordinance, what makes it feasible for us to begin enforcement is that they're now licensed businesses. So go into a little bit more detail on why Mr. Maile, whom I think is maybe out for a snack or home to bed, had to wait 18 months. Correct. Because the reason why it may have taken so long in that particular instance is that in I guess, inspectors were purely enforcing the limitations with the zoning code as it relates to renting or leasing property for less than 30 days. There was there was nothing that spelled out that it shall be unlawful to advertise the short term rental. Without a license number, it shall be unlawful to operate the short term rental, not as a primary residence. Everything fall within the existing zoning code and then asked inspectors to simply had to enforce that leasing provision. So. And what is that process exactly? So a step backwards and my thought to CPD on this a little bit there is that typically when I asked inspectors would have to go in person to the unit, they'd have to knock on the door and hope someone answers. If someone answered, they would have to hope that person admitted that they were operating a short term rental. If they did not admit that they were operating a short term rental. They'd have to go into more investigatory procedures, such as staking out the property quite literally to determine if vehicles were going in and out or if there were out of state licenses. They had to provide some sort of justification other than just what was on line to justify that this person was leasing their property for less than 30 days. The the fines and the notice to comply I don't know those numbers right off the top of my head, but they're much less than are general violations scheduled, which can be up to $999 per incident. Additionally, they could just simply appeal and take that case to the Board of Adjustment and go through that board of adjustment process with our new business licensing tools. We can suspend licenses, we can find licenses and we can show cause licenses to take that business away. So our tools, we feel, are much more efficient and effective than the current zoning code tools that are employed. Okay. So if we pass this law and you take me through. Violations and how they would be handled. How could we shut a problem house down quickly? Right. So what's really important to this is the license number is being placed in the advertisement. So if we find a property owner or a responsible property that continually just advertises their their unit online, we could find them potentially up to $999 per incident of having their license mean. Without a license. Or a correct with advertising without a license. Okay. So they've got a license there. They're legal from that standpoint. So noise complaints, any variety of things. What's the process? Absolutely. So noise complaints that come in disturbing the peace calls come in. We have the authority to work with the director and our inspectors to determine if it really has reached a level where we can show cause that. So we don't necessarily want to say something to the effect of three disturbing the peace violations and you could lose your license. We want to have the flexibility to potentially take action on a license with one disturbing the peace call, quite frankly. So we want to have all of these tools available to us to take action on the licenses. It really is a case by case basis. We can be working with really egregious hosts who flaunt the rules, and we can also be working with hosts who want to comply and who want to be come into compliance. So this wide range of tools not only can help address those egregious hosts that will try to simply flaunt the rules, but it also gives an ability for those hosts to come in and be compliant. Ms.. Loucks, if you don't mind. So as director. Talk about that as far as. Shutting someone down quickly. In the ordinance against the structure of the Department of Excise licenses with some very wise city attorneys that included in the ordinance language the ability to immediately suspend a license. So what that does is I have the ability if there's something where one of these egregious situations happens, we have the ability to immediately suspend the license and basically suspend the due process while we investigate further. So that gives us a little bit of time and flexibility to go in and look at that license and the interim is suspended and then go through the due process if we so choose to pursue a full show course. Okay. Thank you. So how about. People who don't get a license. It's. I'm still a little shaky on how it's more how we can more quickly shut them down. If you're operating without a license, probably the strongest enforcement tool is that general violation per incident. So if we go in every day and go to a web platform and see that this place is listed in five consecutive days, we can just continue to issue these general violations for operating without a license. And they have a maximum fine of up to $999 per incident. So we think that's probably the most immediate tool we can do for operating without a business license. You know, of course, we've talked about it before. We're doing this six month informational kind of soft enforcement by January 1st, because the idea is that's where the strong enforcement starts, where if you're operating without a license at that time, we can go to a general violation. Okay. So this is either for you or Nathan or anyone else who wants to answer it. You seem extremely reluctant to agree to commit to a substantial spot check program. I would suggest it would make huge sense to spot check on primary residence and do spot check on safety violations. What's the heartburn? I know heartburn on any of the safety infractions. I think that is part of our plan is to do this like basically kind of going back to some of the questions from Councilman Flynn is to audit and have a percentage, whether that percentage upfront is 100% of applications that are coming in that we verify primary residency. But we get to a point much like how we do much of our other enforcement, whether it's liquor enforcement, where we rely on an audit based system to get into compliance. And part of that, I think, honestly, we're just using our short term rental advisory committee to help advise us having the community give us that feedback or . Asking us to pass a bill. And telling us that the most important parts of enforcement will be decided down the road. And we don't know what it is. Yeah. And like I said, we're completely open. And like I said, I assume we'll be doing a pretty strong upfront primary residency check just to make sure we're getting into compliance. I don't know that you're going to get a positive vote tonight without more substantial guarantees of enforcement. I really don't. I'm needing that. I'm needing something here. But again, I don't want to I don't know for implying that we're going into not the soft enforcement pieces again, as the rollout, the education piece. But come January 1st, I think we have absolutely every intention for a strong enforcement strategy for combing through the scans. We've we're dedicating our resources and our inspectors. We're dedicating up to 2 to 3 primary inspectors every day to look at these ads, to go out and to respond to neighborhood complaints. I think it's a pretty actually unprecedented allocation of resources that will be going to the enforcement of as come January. If Councilman Cashman, any more questions? I may. And I think just one thing that we wanted to reiterate is that this is sort of a untraditional industry. This is an industry that lives online. It's it's had its success online. So, quite frankly, traditional enforcement tools we need to look at outside the box, enforcement tools we need to look at how we can also leverage that same technology, leverage some sort of digital tools to actually supplement and complement our existing resources. So just how this industry has sort of come online and sort of thrived online as regulators, we want to be able to leverage that same technology in addition to our existing resources that we have. I support that 1,000%, but I don't see why after the lengthy I've been begging for enforcement for months and you can't come to me and say, Well, we'll audit 20%. I don't see what would make that unwise or difficult or expensive. But you're giving me and maybe we're not sure. I'm not. That's all. I think we can put in a number on that like 20%. We can do less than that. We can do more than that. We have all the tools at our disposal to utilize whatever we need. So as this industry evolves, our enforcement, our auditing in our work with the tools that we have will also continue to evolve . But I think we're really on the same page in that we too want a high compliance rate. We too want to make sure that hosts are in compliance with all the regulations, and we're going to use every tool at our disposal and every resource available to accomplish that. I'm not feeling that. And one last question. So if we vote this down, what is the plans for enforcing our current ordinance? Well, just to switch things up A I'll return. I think it you know, it puts us back where we are now in that we only have the existing tools we have now is enforcement. And it's a real challenge. As you heard with the case on Steel Street, you know, there's a cease and desist order is is issued, but it keeps on happening. The new inspectors have to stake the place out to determine that it is still happening. They see the ads online, which is very frustrating to them, but that they can't take action based on the ads online. So, you know, as we said when when we spoke the other day, when we talked to them and I asked inspectors about that, a provision in the ordinance that says it shall be unlawful to advertise without the license number. They were so excited and just thought that was going to make all the difference in terms of enforcement. That's all I've got. Thank you, Councilman Cashman. All right. We have audience members, please. I know it's getting late and I'm trying to, as president, move these procedures through laughing and stomping. That doesn't help. So and we have another public hearing that I want to get to as soon as possible for those people that have been respectively respectfully waiting. So, Councilwoman Gilmore, you're up. Thank you, Mr. President. Nathan, I have a question I want to understand a little bit more about the the addus. So they're on someone's property. They're an accessory dwelling unit. They're essentially an entirely separate structure. But those are okay within the ordinance, the way that it's currently written. Correct. And they're actually identified in the text amendment. So I'll allow Abe to come talk about the text amendment. Sure. So as we discussed earlier. Accessory dwelling units are not allowed everywhere. They are allowed in some single unit zone districts, but but not all. And those are dwelling units that could be in the primary structure but have a separate kitchen. It's it really is a separate unit. Or they could be in a detached accessory structure, which is the more granny flat situation. So assuming you had a legal one, you could use it to host short term rentals if you were a licensed short term rental host. Okay. So thank you. So to that, so to that. How do you propose, if it is a separate structure, assuming that it's in someone's backyard, how will Niasse enforce if that's being utilized as a short term rental or something? I mean, they're basically going to have to ask the neighbor possibly to get into their backyard to look over the fence or get in somehow. So how how is that going to be enforced? Well. So in the in the new if we're talking about the new framework, the primary enforcement mechanism will actually be on licensing. So when calls come in, they go there first. If they mention short term rentals. And, you know, the first thing that will happen is looking at the online advertising. So we start with we can probably with a little bit of research figure out which online advertisement is for that unit, even if it's an accessory dwelling unit. And if it's licensed now, it may be licensed and in good standing, but we then have the ability to relate whatever complaint is coming in from wherever to to that unit. And so it creates again, the advertisement really creates a tool that makes it possible for us to do things without going out into the field and getting in someone's backyard to figure out what's going on back there, basically. So so my question to that, again, it's all online enforcement. We are already within, especially my district have, you know, enforcement issues. I mean, I can send as many photographs of weeds in someone's front yard. And it still takes weeks sometimes to have and I come out and, you know, find the property owner and or if they're renters, to then locate the owner, which a lot of times the owners are outside of the state. And so to track that down. And so how large is your team that's going to be checking these online licenses? I guess this would be to to Nathan. Okay. The problem isn't going to be. Just before turning it back to him and just mentioned that, you know, he's conducted research and talked to a lot of other cities. And that 2 to 3 number that he mentioned of inspectors that are are mostly dedicated to short term rentals is actually more dedicated inspectors than most of our peer cities have dedicated that have regulated short term rentals. San Francisco is a bit of a big exception. They have almost ten, but they've had very low compliance. And I think that just tells you something about streamlining because they have very complicated regulations. But let me let Nathan come up and elaborate more because there actually would be site enforcement as well as the online . Correct. And I think this is a classic example where we could actually partner with an IRS on this enforcement framework. So, you know, I ask you potentially receive those complaints and investigate in the field. We could also investigated in the field a lot of this this issue may be actually complaint driven as well, especially if there are complaints coming from the residence. So we would take the evidence that's given to the licensing department and from our interested inspectors and then utilize these existing tools we have. The way we're proposing this now is that about 2 to 3 excise license inspectors would be dedicated, prioritized towards short term rental enforcement. So these inspectors come in to work at 9 a.m. They go through the ads, they start looking at the complaints that came in to other agencies like nice like environmental health. It's disturbing that these calls, etc., and then our inspection team could then take action on the licenses and issue a suspension. A general violation, if it's egregious enough, will lead to that show cause replication the hearing. Okay, my last question and I'm not sure if this is for CPD or excise and licensing, but the the question that Councilwoman Sussman asked the gentleman about, if you're licensed and it's currently zoned, I mean, there there are gaps then that in certain areas of the city and county of Denver with zoning, someone could have an LLC and not have their primary residence. It would be actually a secondary or I mean, how many could they have? I think the missing piece of information within that conversation is that in order for us, in order for someone to obtain a lodging license from our department, they first need to obtain a zone use permit from community planning and development. So they would go through the zone use permit process, make sure that that the building codes, that the code, the parking requirements there, the ADA is there. You have a fire inspection of environmental health inspection. So there's a series of steps that you need to do to first get your zoning permit. Then you would be eligible to come in and get a lodging license, which is that lodging license is typically oriented towards motels, hotels. But at the same time, if you're able to get that zone use permit through CPD, if you're in a zone district, it allows lodging use. You are still eligible to come and apply for our lodging license, if that makes sense. Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilwoman Gilmore. Councilman Lopez. Thank you, Mr. President. So this is for Nathan or Stacey. I'm interested in a gentleman who said in his comments and he was talking about Our Lady. She was talking about. Toronto, where a company is actually owning units. And I'm wondering, this is this is my question. Series of questions anyway. Can a company or an LLC who owns a property have an Airbnb? The only way that a person can obtain a short term rental license is if that person is a primary residence and they can only have one primary residence. In theory, an LLC or a company could have a property, but a. A a. Essentially, a person would need to be there who can certify that it is their primary residence that they live there. So essentially a long term tenant that lives in a place that is owned by a property owner or or another entity of that nature could still be a licensee under this framework as long as they certify its their place of usual return and it's their primary residence. And the reason why I asked that and I think you know, where I'm getting to, I'm, I'm trying to figure out what defines an individual or a person. And if if these corporate entities are people too, like Citizens United. And so I just want to make sure that a person is a person, that a primary resident is a resident and can't be some kind of real estate company or I mean, a network of companies that's just trying to find a back door person. And in our licensing application, there will be a field where you input your name and your address, as well as your driver's license or your state ID card. So we actually do know you're a person. Okay. I think a lot of other questions have been answered. So that was my only and primary concern right at the moment. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Lopez, Councilmember Sussman and Flanders. Okay. If I leapfrog you to get to Councilman Espinosa, he hasn't had a chance to ask questions. Related to that. Okay, Councilman Espinosa, you're all right. Thanks. I'm going to rattle off a bunch of names here for some brief questions, if any. I suspect that a lot of them have left, and then after that, I'll go right into new and need name while these guys are coming up. So if the following individuals are here. Sherri Way Betsy chuckles Chuck. Chuck Good. Joel Noble. George Mayo. Mary Lou Fanelli. Craig Ellsworth Waiting. No, never mind. Craig, your question has already been asked. J.J. Neiman, Alex, Dodd, and Sheila habits are shallow. Sorry. So in these questions for you, Nate and and Abe, so sorry these came up because of the line of questions here. So I might as well stay on them while we're talking about them. So how many calls a day are we getting on existing short term rentals? You know, we we went through the 311 data earlier this year. And what we tried to do is go through the 301 data since May of 2015. That's the data the 311 had since approximately May of last year. Up until March of this year, we had approximately 135 calls or inquiries in 2311 regarding short term rentals. So 311 was essentially able to code them as a short term rental call. But what we tried to do further was drill a drill down a little deeper and distill those numbers and really try and categorize them. Of those 135 calls, we found that nearly half or about 40% potentially came from one, maybe two individual sources that sort of comb the Internet sites and complained about the use of that short term rental. And that in their neighborhood, about 57 inquiries or about 52 or 42% were specific to the legality of the use. In other words, these were primarily calls that two, three, one one asking whether or not this was legal in their neighborhood. Eight inquiries were related to just the actual ordinance proposal. But my concern is that we're talking about 2 to 3 staff to handle 135 calls a year. So, I mean, with an estimated 2000 of these units, so we thought about how long it would take 2 to 3 individuals working full time, 2000 hours a year each. So 4000, 160 hours to actually go through the website in and look at every single one of these advertisements. In the way we are able to receive calls. One, we have three more one today, and we're able to closely coordinate with 3 to 1 about short term rental calls that come in. So we're able to utilize the existing three year on resources for those calls that come in. At the same time, we can also take complaints. We take complaints and concerns of all of our licenses and licenses that we issued today. So we do have that complaint process. Where these dedicated staff are not dedicated staff. These are these are dedicated staff where they're prioritized, they come in to work and they will do short term rental enforcement. Okay. What is the definition of egregious in enforcement terms? I think a lot of this is sort of the flexibility of the director. So that's what concerns me, is we keep talking about how are we going to find up to $99, $999 for this egregious actor and that we're really going to react to those, but we don't have any definition of what that is. Yeah. I think a lot of this is it's important for the department to have that flexibility on a case by case basis. So we may simply be able to take a host who had violated a part of the requirement. They just simply didn't know it. We may not want to issue a $999 general violation to that. Host. So is there something about a primary resident that only a primary mean, only non primary resident owners are somehow have a tendency to be egregious owners and those that live there are not. I mean, how did we make this distinction? Wouldn't the that litmus test of egregious ness apply to any operator? Yeah. So let's take an example of any of our licenses, right? So we have licenses today that have the run a gamut in terms of complaints or concerns that are levied on to them. You could have one particular license that really has only had two or three complaints, or you have another license in your neighborhood that a city council person may know about, the neighbors know about. They know about this one particular issue that's been causing them grief. We have the flexibility to not only take care of this, of the incidents that may have had just a few complaints, but we also have the flexibility to take care of that complaint that had a lot of complaints. So why not create the tool to deal with complaints and the enforcement component but divorce it of the from sort of the sort of semantics of ownership and whatnot, because this is not a new industry. This has been here for decades. Yet somehow there has been some sort of it's sensationalizing of of this as somehow being now every single operator is now an egregious operator when in fact that's what we need tools for and have always needed tools for is those egregious situations because we've heard about the situations that have been year long battles to deal with. But it doesn't have anything to do with ownership necessarily. But everything to do with egregious owners operating a business that is that is a detriment to a neighborhood. In our license tools, our business license tools have that ability to take care and give relief to those egregious situations that were presented here tonight. But now we're blanketly taking a whole class of owners and saying you're we're treating you even worse than egregious. We're not even giving you the right to even do what you've been doing historically. Yes, sir. Just came up just to just to talk about it. We're going from enforcement into does the primary resident requirement make sense? And I think, you know, others have said said it much more directly and elegantly than I can. But clearly not all non primary resident rentals are bad rentals. Sometimes the properties are very well fixed up. Maybe they're the nicest house on the block. The concerns that we've heard, though, from the residents in many neighborhoods is that that still has an impact on the residential fabric. The concern has always been the lack of enforcement, the lack of enforcement. And I think if we got better at enforcement in dealing with the egregious and even those that are borderline egregious, we would do would go a long way for our neighborhoods to actually maintain that quality of life. And it has nothing to do with who owns it and who doesn't own it. There is some sort of sense that there's pride in ownership. But I you're going to see in one of my questions about I'm going to question that. But you know what? If your your stakeholder group comes back and their very first recommendation is that we need to expand this to all in order to capture the maximum number of businesses and use it, utilize our streamlined process. We need to open this to all residents, I mean, all operators and owners in the city and county of Denver. Are we changing this council? That's certainly their prerogative. That's what the group is for. And if that's what they recommend, will pursue that. There's certainly a public process that needs to go into that. But that public process has gone ongoing in this process. We have not shifted from this four year. I just think in terms of public process, when you say that non primary resident rentals will be allowed, there's a lot of nuances to that potentially. Are they all allowed? Is it just one who gets to have it? Do they have to be a Denver resident? Can they live in Breckenridge? It's just working through all of that is what we would do if we got that recommendation. So to slide 20, and this is the last question and then I got two points on slide 28, you quote said, none of this exist. You know, we have the general violations today. And we have the ability to sort of do a cease and desist. So I think it's sort of false to imply that we're creating all these enforcement tools. When we actually have these enforcement tools, we just. We have these enforcement wars today. We do not have the authority to apply these enforcement tools without this ordinance. Don't have the authority to do a cease and desist for for doing operating a non-conforming and non permitted use. So in our in our licensing code, we don't write. In our licensing coban, our zoning code and our is not asking to do this or is or is excising license or both. Both. Exactly. Well, so. We could be doing this three. And is we so in I guess does not have authority to enforce what's in the lodging license, which is, you know, Morey, our city attorney, give us a little more details of where the language falls within the zoning code and who has authority. And you are right. We do have the general violation tools that we can use to enforce people who are violating the zoning code. But then we run into the same issues that A was discussing earlier about in in as not really having any tools to go out and verify without extensive investigation, staking out neighborhood houses, having neighbors turn on each other. And only then are we issuing general violations to go to those general session courtrooms and have up to. So again, my goal would be actually good, strong enforcement tools, which could actually have been in place. And in dealing with this thing historically, especially for the last two years, that people have been grappling with this rather than sort of now starting to carve this niche where we're not going to get full compliance. You know, I would rather have good, strong, a lot of a lot of latitude, a lot of streamlining to get maximum compliance throughout the entire spectrum of the industry. But with strong enforcement, clear enforcement. I mean, we keep talking about general violations up to 1999, but in in I yes, we have a very graduated system of warning , then 150 and then like 500 than a thousand. I mean, what are what are we doing here? And again, I think the problem is, is that any and I can't enforce it as easily as excise and licensing can when we have businesses that would actually have licenses or not be license that we can check up on further. Any time you have a violation of state, federal or municipal ordinance that triggers the ability for excise and licensing to look into your license and look at what kind of actor y'all are, and then take enforcement action on that license. So it is additional enforcement tools that go beyond what NASA is currently not able to enforce. But the language that we have now. When in the next six months are we going to know what those general violation structure is? So when they go into a General Sessions courtroom, it's a criminal violation that would be subject to a plea agreement. So they would have the opportunity to talk to a city attorney, to hire a defense attorney. So there's no street check. I mean, a ticket that's issued for an amount that starts that process. The charge is what's on the ticket. Right? So whatever we're going to charge, the maximum penalties are $999 fine and potentially probation. Okay. So we keep throwing out that it's up to 999, but no one can tell me what it's going to be day one on January 1st. I think can we can work out plea agreements or plea guidelines, but you never want to restrict and not have that flexibility. If you got a ticket in this realm and were 100% great after all of the time, never had a violation. And then the one time you had a bad guest who got to disturbing the peace case or something similar, you would want the opportunity to go into court to show your merit, to show, look, this was a one off. This wasn't me as a bad actor and have the ability for someone in that situation to look at you, take you as a business owner and give you a penalty that fits what happened in that. Great. So that's what I really wanted my colleagues in public to know, and my colleagues probably already understand it better than I do that, you know, we keep talking about these maximums, but getting there is a process. Right. And I think Nathan's really spoke to the ability for excise and licensing to utilize all those tools to either do the order to comply, to give people the opportunity to get on board before throwing the hammer at them and say. Okay. So I want to point out one other sort of point of fact, which is there was an operator, Mr. Craig Ellsworth, who who we sort of implied that mixed use, if he had been in a mixed use zone district, that this would be sort of perfectly legal. That is not true after the text amendment is passed, because we are now creating this short term category in the mixed use zone districts with the exact same requirements as in any other zone district. Is that correct? So no, the the text amendment actually doesn't change anything about the legality or illegality of lodging accommodations. So if lodging accommodations is a permitted use in your own district and you've obtained a zoning permit and gone through the licensing process for that and you're conducting it legally, that won't change if you enact this ordinance. So but what I'm saying is that if you're a owner, you can go in to zoning, say, I want to do a short term rental and go through that process. But if you're a non owner, you have an out and you're in a mixed use district, you now have to go through that other licensee lodging accommodations process because that's the only way you can operate legally as a non primary resident owner. But a primary resident owner would have the exact same provision as a short term rental use. The right, if you're the non primary resident operator in the mixed use district, you have to go through the lodging accommodations process. If you're the primary resident operator, then you have this more streamlined short term rental process in the future, which right now say I. Don't want to. So it's sort of weird. I don't want the idea to be that somehow it's now okay and in mixed use the way we're talking about, because again, it's still because the text amendment, it is still only available in that capacity mean only available to primary residents as a short term rental. The text amendment doesn't make it any easier to operate a non primary resident car rental in a mixed use district, if that's where you're going. Yes. All right. Now, the three questions is Sherry way here? Was Betsy here? No. Joel. Her? Um. Do you want to read and want me to read verbatim what I wrote? You're going to get a laugh. I said, you're a stickler for rules. So does this zoning text amendment do anything to mitigate the current situation? The zoning text amendment is just zoning separated from licensing. Correct. Oh, I wouldn't I these have to be considered as a package. Okay, good. I want I wanted us to sort of make that clear that you can't the zoning, the change in zoning has to have the licensing component in order to be at all effective. So. Is it so the existing homes that would go. So how many existing homes would go on to the market as a result of this legislation? Speaking to the sort of concern about the lack of affordable housing. So we make this rule and now all non owner occupied non non primary residence. I mean units are now illegal. So how many? What sort of impact will that have on the housing market? Well, I think. You. It's not that if this passes, they've become illegal. They're illegal now. Right. Right. So I think it's terribly hard to estimate what people would do, given that you're talking about people that are willing to operate a short term rental today illegally. It's both hard to say what they would do if this passed and it remained illegal, but there was a brighter light about it being illegal because their listings would be lacking the required license number and it would be more obvious that they're operating illegally and the fines have gone up. But at the same time, if we went the other way and we, you know, you all amended the proposal such that you can do something more than just your primary residence. You could do another one instead of your primary residence. There's really not a good way in what we know has gone on in Denver to estimate how many normal rentals, regular long term rentals would come off the market because you can't look at how many people are doing it illegally and estimate how many people would do it should it become illegal or should have become legal. And that's really my concern. It's not some gift of new housing units that's going to appear. People who have enough resources to have more than one house today have a lot of options in what they do. They can rent it long term. They could you know, they could sell it off. They could keep it as something just for guests. You know, I don't want to estimate that. What I'm what I'm afraid of is if a council member tonight proposed and it passed, it became part of part of the final bill that it was more than just primary residency. I think there's ample evidence from other cities that we could rapidly lose housing units at a multiple of the rate of affordable housing units. We add to the market every year, and not that all of them that we lose would be affordable units. But we'd be adding tremendous pressure to, you know, housing market that's kind of already out of control. Yeah, I mean, and that's where it is. I'm having this conversation with you because this is a conversation that we can have here that I wish we sort of would have had in the run up to this, which is that that, you know, I look at the home as one of our greatest wealth building tools that we have as individuals. And this essentially would double that capacity if you sort of limited to one owner, one property, one STR sort of ascribe to a Social Security number, not a tax I.D. or something like that. So there was one definitive way of saying, okay, that's your limit. You get your one STR, whether you're living in it or not living in it. And that would give you the capacity to either supplement your income or increase your wealth through that mechanism. But we also need to couple that with not allowing renters to then sublet their they're non owned unit on the STR market. And this goes back to the last meeting where I was. I was leaning in heavily on the fact that we do not notify owners. This is a streamlined process where it's just click, click, click, click, click and you're, you're, you're in business with the license. So I just speak to that so too. So we're doing a couple of things that sort of both exacerbate the problem because now we've legalized it for all primary residents. So we could in fact take viable bedrooms out of the affordable housing market. And we are getting away from. Actually maximizing sort of compliance. And it's it's an interesting thought experiment. In housing markets, they're even tighter than ours in San Francisco. They were extremely worried about long term bedrooms coming off the market, not just entire housing units. So they tried a very complicated set of regulations that that had to do with primary residents versus not and and essentially limits to the number of days you could do. And they had some pretty bad unintended consequences because if you gamed it outright, you realized that people had all kinds of incentive. If they were already if they already had a tenant in their house, if it was just a bedroom, it was a border type arrangement. They had every incentive to evict that tenant and do and do short term rental instead. I think we're a different market than that. I think that while, yes, some people invite, you know, third parties that they're not in any other relationship with to be boarders. We don't have a tremendous amount of that in Denver. And so I'm not particularly worried myself about people evicting someone from a bedroom that they're sharing in order to long term in order to do. Short term, it could happen at the margins. What I'm really hopeful about, if we get the incentives right on this, you know, imagine all the people in the in the audience tonight who have multiple homes, maybe they have a second home and they're renting it out short term. And, you know, that's not legal now, but the lights become brighter and they become uncomfortable doing that. They stop doing that. And whatever they do with that second house is their business. It's a really good market to sell it into if they wanted to. But they say, you know, I really liked having that income. What else can I do? I can build an accessory dwelling unit so it meets the requirement for primary residence because it's on your site. It could be a finished basement and an attached accessory dwelling unit or a detached accessory dwelling unit in the backyard. And although their their immediate incentive might be to have that be short term rental. What they've done is create a housing unit. They created a housing unit that didn't exist before. I'm a big fan of accessory dwelling units. I wish we had them available everywhere in the city and a streamlined process for neighborhoods that don't have them now to get them. And I think if we do this right with a package that's in front of you now, people who have the means to build an accessory dwelling, you didn't start getting income from short term rentals , could really incentivize that to get built. And rather than decreasing the availability of housing, we actually increase it. So I'm going to have you take a stab at somebody else's question. That person talked about how they set this, what was right for their community at 30 days. What happens between day 28 and day 30? Like, what if you're renting for seven days or you have four different people renting for a week versus that 30th day? I couldn't possibly speculate. You might have to ask that person. Yeah, that person isn't here. That's that that's that's too bad. So. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. Councilman, you're at 23 minutes. I mean, you continue to ask questions, but I do hope we can get to a point where we can get to the comment periods or. What about? Let me see. 800 Steel Street. Coulson, we can come back to you. We have two other people in the queue if you want to. Get your thoughts together. Well, one question for JJ if he's still here. Oh, great, JJ. What? And then a real quick question for Shayla. So you entrenched in that year long process to sort of deal with a star. What is it about this legislation that would somehow make that process not? I mean, more what would expedite that? Yeah. So. JJ And even with the Denver, I can see some of the way I understood what happened in my neighborhood was that was an owner that wasn't present in the state of Colorado. So this legislation would do is it would make it would give us a chance to know the owners and it would only be legal . There would only be a it would only be legal if. If that owner actually resided in that residence. The biggest problem we have is the biggest problem in my neighborhood has is that there was no accountability. There was no person who had a stake in the neighborhood. And what this legislation that we're bringing forth, this text amendment, is going to require that short term rental owners have a stake in the neighborhood that they're involved in. And I think that stake is going to end. And the kind of enforcement that I have heard, I do believe that the enforcement that we have heard through and seeing the enforcement that we are promised will come in the future will will be sufficient for us to be able to hold these owners accountable. And what I hear tonight is that there are many owners that want to be accountable. And I think that this legislation brings that accountability and allows them to come within compliance. Okay. I my concern is, is that it isn't this is the first night we've been hearing about how swift this action will be. But everything that I've seen and heard thus far about our actual process is actually a long process of due process, you know, to sort of prove that all these problems are happening in order to sort of pull back and, you know, to affect the license. And so I just want you and others to understand that you got a you got a problem. You know, it might be cut and dry to you that it's it is a it is a an issue that should be rectified. It might not be as swift as one might hope. And I wish that's what I wish we were doing somehow, is legislating in such a way that a bad actor and somebody who's not operating under license is out of the system right now. If you don't mind me commenting on that. Yeah. What I would say is that's why we really appreciate Mary Beth bringing this up, because I think what we did is we started shining light on a very dark part of a business in our neighborhoods. And the process that we've gone through over the last two years has shown a lot of light. We've seen a lot, we've worked out a lot of these issues. And we do have confidence that we're going to continue to work out issues as we go forward. I do like hearing that there's going to be a committee and a so this is a deep process and a process that obviously has taken a long time. And I would say that continuing it today and having this this step be part of the conversation is is going to make all of the work we've put in valuable because there is a lot of light already being shown just by the process that we've gone through. All right. Thank you, Sheila. The $21 million, is that an annual number or a. So we could fund our entire affordable housing permanent affordable housing fund just by taxing this one industry. Charlie, we're going to need you to come to the podium. The yeah, the 21 million is the ancillary spending per year. And so yes, the tax revenue would be substantial. And all along we've proposed, although we know that affordable housing is not impacted by non primary residency homes, all along we have proposed the idea of funding affordable housing through taxation. Any sense of how did that study look at what if the Denver Lodgers tax were directly applied to this industry? What it would generate? It looked at it in terms of just the non primary residency homes, which estimated $2 million in taxation. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right. Council members, eight of us have talked for just about half the amount of time as 56 speakers. So we're we're on round two. Council members. I just want to be recognized that if we could keep our comments questions a little bit shorter. Councilwoman Sussman, you're here. I'm in the spirit of getting along with us. Hold my questions. Okay. Thank you. Councilman Flint, you're up. Thank you, Councilwoman Sussman. I'll take your time, then. Actually, I only have three questions. And they came up because of the questions subsequent to my speaking. The city attorney. Oh, we we are making it illegal. And I read it in the ordinance. It would be an illegal act to post a short term rental, advertise it anywhere without a license number. Correct. How can we enforce that? Can we actually I mean, because we've not been able to enforce the ones that are advertising illegal. They're all illegal now in their advertising. Right. So they're advertising to do an illegal act. So how does can we actually fine someone because they don't have a number on their ad? Or do we not have to go in and prove that they are actually conducting the business that they advertised? Because that has been the problem with enforcement in my district. Yeah, I heard somebody say we only had six complaints citywide. I had six complaints just on this one house. Sure. And that's exactly right. I think the enforcement issues is proving that someone is actually using their house as opposed to just advertising them for an Airbnb. With the licensing number, we can look online, see that it's posted and it's listed, and if there's not a license number, we can issue a citation based on that violation alone . Would that hold up and how would that hold up? Don't we have to demonstrate that they're actually engaging in that in the activity of renting it? The unlawful act is licensing or advertising without a license? Not really. Can we do that for political ads? But. Okay. Got it. The three, Nathan, the three staff members, two or three staff members that we're going to shift over to work on stars. What are they doing now? And who will pick up their workload. With the third director on that one? I hate to make you get up. Stacey. Oh, my. God. Oh, thank you. This is kind of labor of love. The two or three staff members, we have an enforcement division, as Nathan talked about earlier, excise licenses for all of our licenses of six enforcement agents. We're moving with a solid to an online inspector application right now. Our inspectors come into our office in the morning, work on what they're going to get for the day, for this type of thing, and then in the afternoon, typically go out and do their inspections because of the technology. Enhancements are going to be made available to us in the next couple of weeks. They're going online. They're going to have iPads in the field, they have printers in the field. So they no longer have that required time that we've been doing using a page. So we're going to get more productivity out of the same number of people and that's how we're going to do this. Added Enforcement. Okay. Is there some is there someone here from Nice? There is no. There's there's not. Has there ever been someone here from Nice? And I seems to have a lot of scope of work here and enforcement. And from my information, they've been involved in very few meetings on this over the two years. Why is there no one here from Nice when this is one of our biggest concerns? How are they going to pick up the workload? So Nice has has been participating in the process and we have been meeting with them. And, you know, they're they're aware of this proposal. They they haven't been coming to most of the public events for this. As we've discussed, the current proposal takes enforcement and puts it into this new framework that will primarily be an exercise in licensing. Primarily. Well, that's a spot on, though. We're talking about the problems out in the neighborhoods that they're having, like with the the house in our district that J.J. was on, by the way, the owner of that was out of state. And my understanding is he's moved back and he's moving into that house and that will be his primary residence. But I don't know how often he'll actually live there. We'll see. Thank you. That's all. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. Any other questions to 61 C? None. Public hearing is now closed. Comments. Councilwoman Sussman. Thank you, Mr. President. Well, thank you all for being sitting in those hard benches for such a long time and for coming out and talking to us. Just want to make a couple of comments. One, in the discussions about enforcement, don't forget that things like noise and loud parties is a police matter. And we can bring to bear all the enforcement that the police can do and that the police would be the people who would enforce that in its enforces things like weeds and fences and the way the property looks in a nice can and will and and will continue to do so with when they try to enforce the less than 30 day rental, that's when they have they they don't have as much ability to do it very quickly. The fact the fact that we are adding a whole department to the enforcement of this is is pretty large to me. It's pretty huge that we have a whole nother body in in addition to the police, in addition to Nice, we now have exercise and license to apply the enforcement. And I really liked what one of the gentleman said, that we don't have data we are going to use. What we learn in this process. We are lucky that we weren't the first to do this. Like we were with marijuana. And we do have some experience with other cities and we have the group that's going to watch and see how we're how we're doing. And I, I feel really confident that we're going to have a better get our arms around this thing better than we would have if we did not do it. If we did not do it, we'd be right where we are, right we are today. And have so many people doing this with it with with not enough enforcement opportunity. I want to thank all the people that helped us do this. You know, the neighbors were some the neighbors who were thanked. We thank. I want to thank you. I think in the two years that we did this and talked about it, we we we came up with a lot of different things. And some of the questions that you're hearing from the council tonight, they were a part of those discussions. Sometimes you realize what we've talked about that we went through that and we tried to figure that out. And I just want to thank you all for for the engagement and and not just the neighbors who aren't hosts, but the neighbors who our hosts who also engaged with us about what the industry was about. This just wasn't easy. And I want to thank, you know, Charlotte and starting the short term alliance during this process so that she could find some way to organize the group that had different points of view. And I think that was very helpful. Thank the hotel industry, the tourist industry and the departments. I'm sorry. I feel like it on like Oscar night or something. And I think all the people that we did this, the the CPD, we had the CPD with, we had regular meetings with CPD and Excise and License and the city attorney and communications and an AC. And I was there all the time too. And we talked through all of these things, but particularly I want to thank Abe and Nathan for just dogging this thing like crazy. And I feel like we have probably what will be considered a model for looking at primary rez, looking at short term rentals at at least at the beginning about how it happened and the fact that we're going to put it all online. And we're we're I feel like we're quite organized about it. I understand my councilman and my fellow council people ask a lot of questions. It's a very complex subject and this isn't going to be the last of it. The whole sharing economy is quite different and is sort of turning things on its head. And and we've got some old laws that don't even have the words short term rentals in them. And it was even difficult to find out that it was illegal. I mean, it wasn't it's that clear right away. It was it was you know, we had to have interpretive nets of words that because we didn't have words like this. Well, this is going to help us put some more modern language into the text to minimize modern language and to excise and license. And it's I feel like it's a it's a really good beginning. And it it didn't get here just all by itself. I would say there were hundreds of people who helped us think this one through. And I thank you for that. In addition to sitting in those hard seats all night, and I urge my fellow council people to vote I on this on both bills. Thank you, Councilwoman Sussman. Councilman Neal. Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to thank Councilwoman Sussman for all the work she did on this and and all the neighborhoods, how they worked closely with her to come up with a compromise that that's going to make this work. And the industry to understand we've got some issues. I think you heard it and I, I will be supporting this bill tonight, but I have a real bad taste in my mouth from all this enforcement discussion, you know, and I just want to encourage you to be proactive. I hate crisis management. You know, Lisa, Brad Buchanan, you saw what happened earlier tonight. They didn't have enough staff and they came in for a supplemental of $1.3 million because they didn't have enough staff to to do the building permits. Don't get into that situation. Use peak performance. We got a great peak performance. Help them let them help you quantify how much manpower you need and go into this budget process because, you know, we're all going to be looking at that budget process. You heard it tonight. We're going to be yelling and screaming about staffing. And so use them to help quantify what you need and start off. But don't get into crisis management. This is the worst situation to be in. So I just want to encourage you to do do well and thank everyone for promoting this. And thank you, Mr. Rose. Thank you, Councilman. New Councilman Flynn. Thank you, Mr. President. I speak as a rank hypocrite because I realize that when I lived 35, 40 years ago in New Jersey, in South Jersey, I used short term renting down the Jersey shore. So I understand the concept, but I also understand that when we rented a place on the beach in Sea Isle, that in the town of Wood. Behind just across the bay. They didn't have this and I checked Airbnb. There are no Airbnbs in Woodbine right now. They're all in Sea Isle. There are places where this is appropriate and there are places where it clearly isn't. And I've been asking for a long time for some kind of voice for the neighborhoods. And I think this is a compromise that not many people are happy with. The folks who spoke from West Wash Park and some of the other neighborhoods said they are only reluctantly supporting this because they see they've been convinced that we can't stop it anyway. So we might as well do what we can to build to build a wall. Sorry. And I'm not going to say what comes after that to prevent the secondary homes. Right. And the folks who want to operate the secondary homes are not happy at all because they're going to continue to be illegal and probably be crack down on it. Yet it is. I've come to I want to thank the industry, by the way, for educating me on this, because I've come to believe that it is those secondary units that actually are very, very useful, not just for my family down at the Jersey Shore back in the seventies, but for folks coming in with their families for weddings or their kids are having treatments at National Jewish, etc., etc.. I've come to see the utility of this and I could support that if neighborhoods had a say on whether they're in their neighborhood or not. Through what I had proposed earlier, the use overlay, which didn't get any traction or through some other mechanisms such as home occupation, zoning permit with informational notice where people could check in. But right now, the neighborhoods have no voice in this, no voice at all as to how commercialized they become. So I'm very disappointed about that. I think we've left out a crucial, crucial step in the process. I think this cried out for a more tailored approach that we have not been able to achieve. Thank you, Mr. President. I'll be voting no, and I urge my colleagues to consider voting no until we get this right and not pick not pick a winner. I think right now, Airbnb's chairman is the only person entirely happy with this. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. Councilwoman Black. Thank you, Mr. President. I've saved my 25 minutes for now. So hold tight, everyone. No, just kidding. Thank you for being here for five and a half hours. Really, really great comments. And I appreciate the passion on all sides. The arguments both for and against a primary residence rule are very compelling. I am not opposed to VR, Bio and HomeAway. I've used them myself and I support private property rights. But now tonight I will be supporting the bill as is with the primary residency rule for four reasons. The first is, I think we need to honor the two year process that Councilwoman Sussman, her staff excise and license and CPD engaged in. And as Joel Noble eloquently, so eloquently said, the process began with animosity and has concluded with a compromise and a compromise that leaves unhappy parties on both sides. Lawmaking does require compromise, but I do think this engagement process needs to be respected. I've heard from my own constituents some of them oppose short term rentals altogether. Those who are supportive have overwhelmingly expressed support for the primary residence rule. The third thing is Denver is undergoing dramatic and sometimes traumatic changes. The new industry is just one of the dis they one of the things disrupting life as we know it here in Denver. So I think we need to ease into this and see how it goes. I'm really pleased that we're going to have an advisory group, and I think we should let them do their work and monitor the industry and we can adjust as we go along. My fourth point is that our experience with legislating marijuana has taught me that it's better to open the door slowly to a new industry because once the floodgates are open, it's nearly impossible to close them. So I am supporting the bill, but I strongly support the work of the advisory group and the possibility of adjusting the regulations in the future and the future future opening up of the industry. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman Black. Councilman Clark. Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you. I want to add my thanks to everyone who came out to speak tonight to make your voice heard and stuck with us for so long. During the public meeting, Lucky District seven almost had the first word with Cherry Way and the last word with Dirty Grant being one away from the final and so many in between, because this is such an important issue to the people that I represent. I think that the process is really important here, and this was a long process, a very involved process, as you as so many of you have heard and been a part of. I honestly never thought when I was running for office that I would ever see ANC and West Wash Park Neighborhood Association out largely to support any kind of legalization. Anything that brings Charlotte and Tim and Gerda and Cheri and Charlie to the table in any kind of support means that it was a significant compromise. And another one of my constituents there, McCarthy said. Sometimes a good piece of legislation looks that way because nobody is really happy with it. It means that all sides had to give something and were willing to give something to come to the table. So I believe that this is just the beginning, and I think for this to be successful, we absolutely must show that we can enforce and we can enforce well. And I hope that that is something that that that all staff is hearing and hearing loud and clear. I totally second Councilman Hughes statement that I will be looking in the during the budget process as to where it is that we as a council can throw our weight behind throwing more people to this and enforcement of this so that we can show that this can work in all the ways where it has not been working . So far, I think that this is a great first step. As Councilwoman Black said, opening the door slowly. I really look forward to the short term rental advisory group and really having that group really look at this and letting us know where we got it right and where we missed the mark. I will be supporting this and I hope that it passes so that we can start moving down that path. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Clark. Councilman Cashman. Thank you, Mr. President. Well, I fortunately had some wise people in my life. Told me to not always say the things you feel like you want to say on the moment, but to think about them a little bit. I'm not going to burn this down because enforcement is critical to this situation. And I'm convinced that this ordinance has within it the enforcement teeth that we don't have by doing nothing as far as the. Discriminating by. Picking a winner when I'm picking any winners. The whole ball of wax is illegal right now where we're trying to craft a situation that makes sense for our community. I really hope. Somebody competes and competes well with Airbnb, because while I have great respect for a lot of the hosts I've talked to, I find that company extremely difficult to deal with. I don't think they care a whit about community. So I'd like to see the industry get a bit more of a social conscience. The. Yeah, I just. Oh. Conscience would be good. No, nobody else has been. There's been one person in the room that's been laughing at other people and one person only. So I'll leave that at that. I think it's important. My main motivation, I do. There's a gentleman here earlier and a couple of people have said they don't believe short term rentals affect affordable housing. Everything that I've read from all over the country disagrees with that. I think affordable housing is the most important issue we face as a city. I understand bringing tourists in and making it easier for them to visit. I think that's important. But our firefighters and our police officers are looking at other jurisdictions because they can't find housing. Our teachers are looking at other jurisdictions because they can't find housing. My daughter is moving out of the city because she and her husband can't find affordable housing. They want to raise a family and they can get twice the house per square foot than they can get in Denver. So with that. I believe it's clear that this council is adamant on an enforcement arm. I think there'll be a lot of eyes on it, and I believe that that staff is serious about it. Though I would have liked more detail early on. So I will be supporting this as too much good work has gone in. And the main thing is, like I said, I think if I thought by doing nothing we would get enforcement. Then I'd vote this down. But I don't believe that to be the case. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Cashman. Councilman Espinosa. Yeah, I. What to me, what makes sense when we do this and it is not unlike marijuana laws when we we take a first crack. Well, I agree with the notion that we open the door slowly. It's the how and what these laws should do is ensure maximum compliance, not be satisfied with 20, 30, 40, 50% of the industry, but do make create a law that's going to capture as close to 100% of that industry with strong, streamlined enforcement, not streamlined, just the compliant I mean, the licensing side for a fraction of the industry, they capture that entire industry but have strong, streamlined enforcement. And this law does neither while allowing limited use in every single zone district that nearly every single zone district in the new zoning code city wide. I agree with my colleague Councilman Flynn that this should be not a limited but is open so that it's a notification process at least 15 days so that people know that this is going to happen on any single parcel that adjoin adjoining them. So and it's really unfortunate because by not capturing the entire bandwidth of the industry, we are giving the large, largely silent operator that has been operating here essentially for the last 20 years. We're kicking them out of the process. And that's just seems really, really strange because we're reacting. We're shooting from the hip and reacting to an app that that is not doing what we're trying to do, which is actually get good compliance and enforcement. So we're creating this thing. Hopefully we can do it with that task force later on. But I think we should have come out of the gate with those rules, and I think we had time. What I didn't see over this two year, and I take real exception to that and I wasn't going to go there, but I will. Two years of so-called negotiating on this, I'm calling bulk. You know, what happened was a shared economy task force where they were looking at everything. We haven't seen any ordinance come across on vehicles, Lyft, Uber, anything else that was part of that original discussion. What we have is this, and that has not changed and has not moved one inch since. Well, maybe an inch, but not much since I showed up July 20th. And so for the better part of one of those two years, it has been essentially this way with language that I was not able to see until the filing deadline. That is just not how we operate in an open and transparent government. So we got what we got and good, good on those guys that made it happen. But I can't support that sort of behavior or or this sort of bill things. Councilman Espinosa. Councilman Brooks. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for everybody who's in here. You guys look so tired. And I want to thank you for paying for parking. Maybe it didn't. And sitting in these hard seats for so long and for the folks who had to go home. Appreciate you. I got a pretty different perspective on this. And I just tried to listen and stay open tonight, but I had a front row seat into this experience the last eight months because my neighbor two doors down went to Bali, Bali for eight months and just have, you know, been doing their short term rental the entire time. And me and my wife and three kids are next to this facility home and they have people going in and out. And there wasn't one complaint on my block and I even asked every. One on the block. And so, you know, it's interesting that there's a lot of focus on, you know, enforcement and things like that. And I appreciate that. I know it's different in different neighborhoods, but I just thought that was an interesting observation. I understand the two year conversation. I was with. Counsel and. Councilwoman Sussman on those two years, and I get it. But in two years as well, I think you learn information that will, you know, may give you another give you new information to to change your mind. And and my mind changed in that two years. There is not enough support on this council for what? How my mind has changed. My mind has changed to the point of saying you can either use your primary or another residence, but you only get one. Because I realize the affordable housing conversation, you don't get two, you get one. And you you get to choose. Not enough support on this council for that. I will be supporting this bill because I do feel like progressive cities have to deal with an onslaught of new ideas and innovation. And so I believe I want to honor this process. I believe it was I disagree with Councilman Flynn. I do believe there's a lot of neighborhood leaders in here at 11 p.m. that don't need to be here and they are here to testify in favor of this. And so this has been an inclusive community process. And I want to thank everybody at the table who came on board for that. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Brooks, Councilwoman Gilmore. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to respect the two year process that Councilwoman Susman brought folks through, and knowing that not doing anything does not get us closer to a solution. And so by regulating an industry, it will help us protect the integrity of our neighborhoods. The primary residency, I understand both sides very well. I think I've been very honest that, you know, my husband and I own a house in Montebello. If we wanted to move into a ranch style house, because going up and down stairs, sometimes about 430 in the morning, I think, wow, I'm going to need a ranch style house someday. And I have children. I would like that house if they would like that, you know, to be gifted to them someday. But understanding, you know, Joel's comments as well around looking beyond this conversation and hopefully this conversation and voting on this ordinance will spur a much bigger conversation that we need to have around density in our neighborhoods. And 80 years, I mean, when we were in Brooklyn, you know, I stayed in the Red Hook suburb or the area of Brooklyn. I mean, you walked two streets over. It was one of the largest, you know, housing tenements in the city. And when we would tell our cabdriver we need to go to Red Hook, they would be like, What for? Why are you going there? And two blocks over, you saw density that you needed to have and and really encouraging that growth in a neighborhood where it was difficult, but understanding that, you know, 80 years are possibly our next step in the city and county of Denver. And, you know, I've got a big backyard in Montebello, and if my 19 year old, it's going to take him 15 years to save up money to buy a home. There's another answer and there's different ways to think about it. And so I do want to thank all the folks that are here, and I will be voting yes on this to protect the integrity of our neighborhoods. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilwoman Gilmore. Councilman Lopez. Thank you, Mr. President, I. I'm very, very supportive of this. This question in front of us today, this ordinance that regulates an industry that is unregulated. And even before there was Airbnb, there was folks renting their rooms. Since I can remember, it's always been in Denver, whether it's been legal or not. And now we have an opportunity to identify that universe, to regulate it, to permit it, and to put it on the radar. And that's going to be the case with a lot of new industries, especially in the sharing economy. And no neighborhood is immune from it. Not one is more important than the other or anything like that. In this city we do have a housing crisis and an affordable housing crisis, if that. And we need to find other alternatives to how to how do we address that now? I love the idea that, you know, we could possibly tax the industry to pay for affordable housing. I think it's a brilliant idea. I love to revisit that. Uh huh. I'm a tax happy Democrat. I like that. Oh, no laughing here, right. I really believe that in the future, ideas are the answer. Not just for a use like this, but for affordable housing. Um. It is in a very important. Now we look at those kind of alternatives and those kind of tools that exist or silent tools that are right there in plain view in our zoning code that we can utilize. And in 2010, when we did the citywide rezoning, I was a council member then and in District three, in Westwood, in Barnham and in Villa Park, some parts scattered throughout. In some of these other areas, you see adus areas that are eligible for aid to use where before we didn't have it. And that's what's going to help not just this industry and this sharing economy, but also our affordable housing crimes crisis. I would love one day, uh, knowing that neighbors are taking care of family members and their ideas, being able to have that independence. And I don't want to call it a grandma mother in law flat or a grandma flat because I know some I know some grandpa that could use that as well, too. So starting with this guy right here. But no, I'm super I'm very supportive of this. You know, I think we do need to revisit the conversation in terms of how this industry looks in the future. But with that, I, um, I am a yes vote for this. I do want to see this move forward. Yes, we need the appropriate enforcement, but we also need enforcement for regular, nice issues. It's very hard. And those folks are very overworked. We need inspectors all across the board in this city. And so I hope that's something that, you know, and I and here's the thing. I think we have as a city council, as the legislative branch of government, is the one that actually holds the wallet in the city. We have ourselves to look out for that, not budget cycles coming around. And that's something that we can program in the budget. So it's not necessarily ask looking at the department for the answer, it's also providing the apartment or the apartment, the department with the tools and funding necessary to be able to enforce this. So thank you, Mr. President. With that a yes, vote for it. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. Um, well, everyone has talked, so I will just briefly chime in. One, I appreciate all your comments. I you can't read this and if you zoomed in, you still can read it. But my, my notes for each one of you in what you were writing and I appreciate all the value added comments. It's disappointing when we have such a serious topic. We have individuals that choose to make lie and laugh and joke at individuals that only have a 3 minutes to speak. And I want to apologize for them for doing that because I believe that's extremely disrespectful because we offered them that opportunity when they speak, but they don't give you that same respect back. You know, it's interesting, even if we didn't pass this law, we had the conversation, we could not we don't have the the right enforcement mechanisms to stop short term rentals. That's why it takes as long as it does in this current process. So even if we just want to fix the problem, we need to pass some law so that we have better enforcement tools because we know right now that we don't even have those. And Elizabeth, I love your quote. I'm paraphrasing how you said sometimes you have to break the law for transformative things to happen. I thought that was absolutely brilliant when you said that, because I think that's very fitting. Governments always behind you. Think about Uber and Lyft, which is regulated at the state, by the way, not the city. But can you imagine if that wasn't around? I mean, that's something everybody uses now, and yet the state had to catch up on that one. So for Councilwoman Sussman and their team to have the vision two years ago to realize we need to catch up with that, I think that's remarkable. I asked the question about the primary residences, because this is what I think the issue is. And Mr. Ludwig has said, Ludvig, I was given my German accent, made the comment, eradicate fear through knowledge. And I think there's just this fear about what happens if we don't do this. And so when I ask the question, is it about knowing who to hold accountable? And I believe we could have gotten that with an with a non primary resident piece. I think about Ms. Ault who lives and who has a property and her property is five blocks away. Well, you know, she's we know who she is. So if her non. The primary resident had an issue. We could go directly to Ms.. Ault and say, We have an issue, let's fix that. And I feel as if that was kind of a middle ground we could have met without having a primary residence to make those neighborhoods have that need, like we know who to hold accountable. And my amendment would have been Denver resident one Short term rental, whether you live there or not. Denver Resident I think that would've been a great starting point. It wasn't a support. That's the way our that's the way that our democracy works. So but to to not have anything I think is the certainly wrong way to go. And I at some saving grace I have to know this the short term rental advisory group has the capability to look down the road and say, you know what is not as bad as we think it is, let's make these tweaks. So I, I would hope that we can move forward with this bill, get that group in place to see how we can better these regulations. Because I, I think we certainly are moving in the right direction. Certainly could be better. But in essence, do I want to kill the whole bill? Because I don't I think we could have gone further. I'm not sure how wise that is. So, you know, other comments. Madam Secretary, roll call. SUSSMAN High Black Eye. Brooks Clark. Espinosa No. Flynn No. Gilmore I. Catherine Hi. Lopez I. Knew. Mr. President. I. Madam Secretary, please close the voting after results. 92 days. 1961 to 61 has been placed on final consideration and do pass. All right. We've got to 62 that we delayed. So let's get that on the floor. Councilwoman Gilmore, would you please put Council Bill to 62 on the floor for final passage? Thank you, Mr. President. I move that council bill 262 be placed upon final consideration and do pass. It has been moved and seconded. Any comments on to 62? Scene nine. Madam Secretary. Roll Call. Assessment. By Black Brooks. Clark. Espinosa. Flynn. No. Gilmore. I can. I can. Each. New. Uh, Espinosa? No. Lopez. Lopez. I. Mr. President. I. Madam Secretary, please, first of all, announce the results. 9829992 days. 262 is then placed on final consideration and does pass. All right. We are on to the next one. Council Bill 306, Councilwoman Gilmore. And for those of you choosing not to stick around, I could ask if you could just please keep quiet as well. Moving on to their second public hearing. Councilwoman Gilmore, would you please put Council Bill three on six, three or six on the floor for final consideration and do pass? Happy to do so. Mr. President, I move that council bill 306 be placed upon final consideration and do pass. It has been moved. Council. I need a second on the screen. It has been moved and seconded. We're going to have to waive transition for those given the staff report to come on up to the front and if they could. Mr. DELANEY, I'm not sure who's giving the staff report, but. Here is. Tim. I heard a big announcement before that. And colleagues, remember, we have to have seven on the dais to move forward. So if I want to make sure we keep seven up here on the dais for this. All right. We're we're still getting that first. Okay. All right. The public hearing for Council Bill three, a one hour courtesy public hearing for accountability ethics is now open. May we have the staff report? And Mr. Delaney, are you starting to do that report? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. Members of council. We're here to proposing your bill 306, which is to raise the sanitary and storm sewer rates within the Wastewater Enterprise Fund here within the Department of Public Works. The Wastewater Enterprise Fund is a government owned utility. It's made up of storm sewers, sanitary sewers, storm handles the water that falls from the sky, the irrigation water runoff, that sort of thing. Sanitary handles the water that comes out of our homes from our dishwashers, our showers, etc. Storm billing is based on impervious surfaces within your property and is billed annually. Sanitary is based upon your water consumption and February. And it's billed monthly on the bottom of your Denver water bill. The storm system has about 750 linear miles of sewer and is about 40 years old. On average, the sanitary system is twice as large, nearly 1500 miles and is 60 years old. We do not treat our own sanitary sewage. We it's treated by the Metropolitan Reclamation District, which is a special district that treats the sewage for 60 municipalities and counties within the metropolitan area. Why do we need. Why are we asking for a rate increase, first of all, to protect people and property who are currently living in hazardous flooding areas. Second of all, to maintain and replace aging infrastructure. Third of all, to improve water quality in the water that we discharge into the Platte River. And fourth, to keep up with the service demands in a city that is growing by almost 1500 people a month, storm rates are driven primarily by two things construction where we want to go from an average annual investment of $20 million to $30 million a year under the next for the next five years. And water quality, which would be spending over $20 million on water quality over the next five years. The sanitary system is driven primarily by paying for the treatment of our sewage by the reclamation district, and that rate is going up at a rate of about 8% per year. The other driver of sanitary is the construction. We want to go from two and a half million a year investment in the infrastructure to 8 million. And that will do two things that will both replace and repair our current system. But it is also building additional adequacy or additional service adequacy into our system because we have many areas that are growing that don't have adequate sanitary sewer lines. The rate increases we're asking for for storm starting in July seven, 2016, is 11% and 11% and 17 11% and 18 10%, 19, 10% and 20. That's an average of 10.6% rate increase per year over the next five years. 6.4% of that will go to construction. 4.2% of that will go to operating costs. Sanitary. We're asking for 5% in 2016. 5% and 17. 4% in 18. 4% in 94% in 20. Which for a total average annual increase in sanitary of 4.4%. Half for construction. Half for treatment. This will be cost the average rate payer within the city and county. Denver $23 per year for both set increase for both sanitary and storm. A little less than $2 a month. The combined bill will go from $320 per year in 2015 to $426, an increase of $116 from 2016 to 2020 . In terms of the rate, we have a staff here tonight who are here to answer your questions. And we will be we'll wait till your get to that portion of the of the meeting tonight. Thank you, Mr. Delaney. So we have 36 people signed up as this is a one hour courtesy public hearing. Only if each of the first 20 uses their entire 3 minutes, we will not have the opportunity to get to all speakers, which I would say if you can certainly make your points in less than 3 minutes, I'm sure the people behind you would be appreciative of that. We tend to alternate pros and cons in this instance. There are certainly more people against the fees than those that are in favor. So there is a slight. As I look at the order that the staff there might be some more we have to speak people speaking against versus four but all those speaking for will have the opportunity speak those against it. We'll just see how the conversation goes. The one hour goes from the beginning of the first speaker on my timer, and once the one hour is up, the courtesy public hearing ends. I will call the first five. And the quicker we make it up to the to the power to speak the transition, that would be great and certainly involved with the clapping. I would hope we can keep that to a. So we can get as many speakers as possible. First five speakers up are and Andy sent Trina Moya, Jeff Shoemaker, Theresa M now and Ben Shannon. So you five can make your way up and Andy since you can begin your remarks when you're ready and each speaker gets 3 minutes. Thank you, council members for the opportunity to weigh in. My name is Andy, since I currently serve as a co-chair of the City Park Neighborhood Advisory Committee. And while my comments here are my own, I'd like to say that my position in that capacity has given me a lot of a lot of contact with the city staff and engineers associated with that Park Hill, as well as the opportunity to attend several meetings that just focused on the concerns of specific people who oppose the project. So I feel that I have a good understanding of of what we're trying to do here. I support the stormwater fee increase. I know you've heard from many people who have been persuaded that the project is not a good idea by the very compelling videos and messaging produced by organizers of the opposition. While much of that feedback is predicated on legitimate concerns, I'm skeptical whether all the people you've heard from are basing their objections on accurate information. For example, my next door neighbor believed because of an article that she read in the Greater Park Hill News and other Facebook post, that this project would literally destroy the golf course and pave it over with some kind of concrete water basin. This is obviously not accurate, and she was frustrated to learn she'd been misinformed. Multiple postings on social media recently have indicated that stormwater fee increase will all, quote, all go towards the Platts Park Hill project. This is not accurate. Opponents have claimed that taxpayers are going to be on the hook for thousands of dollars in additional stormwater fees. This is not accurate. Last week on Mr. Evans Facebook page, somebody posted a picture of a concrete lined L.A. River as a representation of what the open channel and call will look like. This is not accurate. People claim that Platt's Park Hill puts Globeville in a floodplain. Since the weakness in the levee occurs upstream from where stormwater will enter the South Platte and was discovered as part of a completely separate project being conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers. This is not accurate. Opponents continue to refer to the golf course detention as a sump or a cesspool. This is not accurate. The newest video that featured a link to a petition claims that Platt's Park Hill will do nothing for flooding in the neighborhoods, according to the engineers who designed the system. This is simply not accurate. Opponents of this plan have been very good at painting a picture of a community unified in their opposition. But at no point did they ever reach out to the City Park Neighborhood Advisory Committee. People can say what they'd like to about our NAC, but we are composed of delegates from each of the RINO's adjacent to the park. R.A. selected their own delegates to our committee. We meet every month and our meetings have been attended by numerous leaders of the opposition to this project. But at no point did any of them ever engage us to get a sense of where our communities are. They certainly would have heard some support for their opposition. East neighbors and CP fan have been very strong and clear in their objections to the project, but opponents would not have heard a unified neighborhood voice. I also find it instructive that now that we're close to killing, platypus to kill, and literally nobody is afraid that that means the end of Scott's preferred alternative. Maybe the connection between these two projects is not as nefarious as it's been made out to be. It seems clear to me. Your 3 minutes are up, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Trina moya. Hello. My name is Trina Moy. I'm a coal resident. I'm not opposed to an increase in fees per se. I realize they've not been increased for several years and we've had we have a need for improved infrastructure for our sewage and stormwater system. However, I am concerned about the nearly doubling in fees over five years. What is now a relatively affordable expense will no longer be so in a few years, and many of my neighbors who have a fixed or lower income will be hit the hardest. I am guessing that a less severe increase would be needed if the plat to Park Hill project were not considered. I'm a resident of coal and I first learned about the Platte Park Hill project from one of my neighbors who took it upon herself to go door to door to spread the word as much as possible. Project leaders have patting themselves on the back for holding so many public meetings, yet we wouldn't have even known about them if it weren't for her. This is just one example of the lack of transparency around this plan. I'm amazed that project management continued to deny deny that it is tied to I-70 and claim that they are implementing it because it's vital to our safety. The neighborhoods in the Montclair Park Hill Basin's have been flooding during heavy storms for many years. Yet nothing was done. There was no concern until it was time to start work on I-70. The plan will do little to nothing for those areas that see the greatest flooding. It will, however, provide flood mitigation for I-70, the national western complex and many new developments about to begin around the 30th, 38th and Blake Station. I do not believe the residents of Denver should be saddled with the financial burden for the drainage system needed for city and private development projects. I've read quotes from experienced engineers indicating that our current flooding issues could be resolved with much less drastic plans. We already have a sewage and stormwater drainage plan that was approved in 2014 and would relieve much of the current flooding issues. I ask you to continue with this plan and Dump Platte plant to Park Hill. I received a flier in the mail last week talking up the benefits of the PDP plan. I would like to know if this increase in fees and the PDP project have not yet been approved. Why are we already receiving this flier as though it's a done deal, a work in progress? Just how much of this has already been approved behind closed doors? We hear government officials talk about transparency all the time. But it's things like this that cause citizens to suspect underhanded methods and doubt that our representatives are speaking the truth or looking out for our best interests. This whole experience has left me feeling suspicious, marginalized and unheard.