||| FROM STEVE BERNHEIM, ORCASONIAN REPORTER |||

The San Juan County Planning Commission has recommended a moratorium on applications for vacation rental permits. The recommendation was adopted at the Commission’s monthly meeting on Friday, November 20 convened for the purpose of further pondering revisions to the Land Use Element of the County’s 20-year comprehensive plan for the period 2016-2036, still being drafted.

The Commission also recommended that going forward, future vacation rental permits (if any) be issued as personal licenses rather than, as under the current system, as vested land use designations, passing from owner to owner, “running with the land.”

The County Council is not yet scheduled to receive the Commission’s recommendations and after numerous requests has not yet imposed a moratorium.

The Commission learned that there are 603 compliant “vacation rental” permits and 360 non-compliant “vacation rental” permits. The Commission also learned that “bed and breakfast” permits are not counted among the “vacation rentals” units in the County. While short-term room rentals inside the host’s home can be either a “vacation rental” or a “bed and breakfast,” only “vacation rentals” can include stand-alone homes or accessory dwelling units with private kitchen facilities. At the time of the meeting, the number of “bed and breakfast” permits was unavailable.

In other action, the Commission’s ideas for comprehensive plan revisions promoting affordable cluster housing in rural areas included marginal modifications of performance standards and prohibiting any construction not contained the project’s original site plan. Despite the pleas of an affordable housing organization, the Commission decided to retain restrictive covenant requirements not applicable to affordable housing elsewhere in the county, requirements that complicate affordable development in rural areas.

As to comprehensive planning to encourage more affordable housing for farmworkers, the Commission recommended limited expansion of a farm owner’s ability to build farmworker housing on site.

In addition to these substantive recommendations to the comprehensive plan, technical difficulties plagued the near five-hour session held on YouTube and the County’s so-called “AVCaptureAll” website, and via telephone on Skype. The Planning Commission has, since the onset of remote meeting during the COVID pandemic, been unable to convene a zoom-type video livestream meeting during which the public, staff, and Commission can see and hear each other and the materials under consideration. The meeting was also delayed for fifteen minutes while public comments concerning the agenda items under consideration were located in the County’s spam folder.


 

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