— by Steve Mckenna —

One year ago I wrote a “Guest Opinion”, referenced here ( orcasissues.com/guest-opinion-moratorium-on-vacation-rentals-needed-immediately/), suggesting a moratorium on Vacation Rentals until the County addresses the issues caused by their continued proliferation. While the County appears to be starting to take a look at Vacation Rentals I would suggest that they engage the public in that look, and have some public meetings and discussions to determine what all Islanders think about the issue, or for that matter, whether it’s an issue at all.

In 2015 the county issued 81 permits for VacRs (numbers provided by planning staff) with approximate 25 on Orcas. So far this year , through the first week of June, there have been applications for 33 VacRs county wide, 16 on Orcas, and as the applications are essentially rubber stamped, I assume that all or most of these will be approved. So at the current rate that is 160-170 homes in 2 years that may have otherwise been available as homes for our teachers, firemen, carpenters, caregivers, restaurant and store employees etc. These houses are only occupied sporadically for 3 or 4 months then sit empty the rest of the year. Many of these are definitely not high end waterfront and view homes, they’re average homes that would otherwise rent at an affordable rate. I personally know of many of these and a look at the published addresses clearly shows many more. Businesses that can afford to are having to buy housing so their employees have a place to live, but what about other businesses that can’t afford that, where will their employees live ? Will our schools have to start buying housing for teachers, our fire departments for EMTs and first responders ? When “investors” buy up houses with the apparent intent of turning them into VacRs to pay off their investment, that takes those houses out of either the supply of rentals that islanders might live in or affordable homes that islanders might buy. Do we owe investors the right to make money at the cost of loss of the livability and community in our Islands? Do we want our Islands to become even more stratified, our workers to ride over on the ferry then leave at the end of the day ? That doesn’t build community, put children in our schools, or diversity in our lives.

There are also many other issues caused by VacRs, some of them are: noise (party time, often here for weddings etc), overuse of water supplies, (particularly problematic in systems shared by adjoining houses) and septic systems abused by overcrowded houses and people who are used to city sewers, not septics. While these issues are fairly easy to solve, dealing with them should not be construed as dealing with the vacation rental “problem”, which is I believe, that there are just too many of them.

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