Sedona City Council heard 26 Sedona area residents speak on short-term rental regulation on Feb. 8, and the council let them know that Sedona will not be looking into implementing all of Paradise Valley’s new regulations.
Out of the residents that spoke, only a few were not short-term rental owners in the area. With the majority of the state looking at Paradise Valley’s new regulations, including in-person check-ins, emergency response within an hour and required liability insurance, Sedona STR owners spoke about their disapproval of the city looking into those regulations.
“When I heard about what was happening today… it just seemed so outside the realm of sanity that I felt a need to at least come down and speak,” STR owner and longtime Sedona resident Gabriel Browne said. “I would just really implore you to look at it from that angle and to understand that this is a livelihood that we all share. And … if we really do owe everything we have to tourism right now, we certainly don’t want that to decrease.”
Prior to the public hearing, City Attorney Kurt Christianson presented the council with the staff’s proposed regulations that are similar to Paradise Valley and Scottsdale. These include:
n Requiring emergency contact information
n Emergency contact one-hour response times
n Noise and nuisance fines increases
Christianson said that these were the only regulations that the city was discussing putting into motion, due to the unclear advantages as well as legal issues that city staff perceive with Paradise Valley’s proposed ideas.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t have the bad actors show up tonight, which I’m told … usually are the corporate-owned properties,” Vice Mayor Scott Jablow said to the local STR owners. “They’re the biggest offenders from what I’ve heard …. I only wish that they could take a page out of your playbook and follow your rules because they’re not following ours. So keep that in mind.”
Some other short-term rental owners from the area included Joyce Burger, Virginia Camp, David Foster and Max Knaus. All of these speakers, along with many others, owned Airbnbs in the community, while also being in-city residents for many years.
After council members clarified their goals for the STR regulations involving only a limited number of Paradise Valley’s proposals, the council thanked the owners for sharing their perspectives that had been limited before.
Specifically, Councilman Jon Thompson asked these residents to participate in the upcoming community plan public participation surveys and committees. He said that since the Community Plan 10 years ago did not consider short-term rentals, which were illegal under then-city code, perhaps it is time for the council and plan committee to consider it for the next update in 2023.
“Here’s an opportunity for you to participate with your fellow neighbors to help define what Sedona needs to be like in the future,” Thompson said. “Do we want to be a neighborhood kind of a place that maybe we grew up in that didn’t have rentals on every corner that was strictly residential? Or are we that much of a tourist town that we need to acknowledge the fact that there is a different kind of lodging that is necessary?”
