Short-term rental surge near Yosemite leads to stronger enforcement by Madera County
Madera County is cracking down on unlicensed short-term rentals, which have exploded in recent years in mountain communities near Yosemite and Bass Lake, among other places.
The years-long debate on short-term rentals in Madera County has included acknowledgment of their contributions to the area’s tourism economy, but also complaints to the county that too many homes are being converted, that visitors leave trash in residential areas and that overflows of cars sometimes block neighborhood streets.
The county is also upset because many of these rental operators have not registered as businesses, failed to renew their licenses or become delinquent on their quarterly local tax returns. In an effort to put unlicensed operators on notice about local laws, the county granted new enforcement abilities to the Treasurer-Tax Collector’s office in June.
“Why should you be able to operate your business when you’re not even in compliance with the county that you’re operating in?” said Jacqueline Torres, the county’s deputy treasurer-tax collector. “This is allowing us to hold them accountable, saying, ‘We’re going to pause your license. You have to pay this.’ ”
The county’s new rules allow its Treasurer-Tax Collector’s office to repossess any business license that becomes delinquent, and to deny business license renewals until all of a non-compliant operator’s accrued outstanding fees and penalties are paid off. The county has also updated delinquency fees and added a new $250 penalty for short-term rental owners found to be operating without a license, among other new costs.
The new measures, helped by the use of software that scans thousands of rental platforms daily, could help the county collect tax revenue it has been missing out on during a post-pandemic boom in travel that has led to hundreds of millions of dollars spent within its boundaries.
Data from Visit California, the state’s tourism bureau, show that 26% of all traveler spending in Madera County from 2021 to 2023 came in the form of visitors paying for short-term rental stays. Last year, travel spending in the county reached $430.1 million, with visitors’ short-term rental spending alone accounting for $120.6 million.
“Short-term rentals extend the lodging capability for our area and also provide another option, especially for larger families traveling together,” said Rhonda Salisbury, CEO of the Yosemite Sierra Visitors Bureau in Madera County. “There’s more generational travel. It seems like a big trend.”
But Salisbury said that $120.6 million in short-term rental spending reported by the state includes legal and illegal operations. This means that many of those operations did not necessarily forward general fund revenue to the county generated by its 9% tax on customers who stay in everything from hotels to motels and Airbnb-type rentals.
In the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the county’s “Hotel and Motel” taxes generated $6.7 million for its general fund. Many operators who are compliant with county laws will post a Transient Occupancy tax certificate somewhere visible to customers, said Tracy Kennedy, head of the county’s Treasurer-Tax Collector’s office.
In April, the county Treasurer-Tax Collector’s office had identified 400 non-compliant short-term rental operators out of a total of 1,600. (The 1,200 licensed operators show an increase in compliance from 1,066 last December and from 410 pre-pandemic.)
“We’re dwindling that number down,” Treasurer-Tax Collector Tracy Kennedy said about the hundreds of non-compliant operators her office found.
The Tax Collector’s office has been identifying non-compliant short-term rental operators using Deckard Technologies software that monitors 10,000 rental websites daily and maps out all listings in an area with dots. Staff can then identify which listings are licensed. Those that are not licensed are referred to the county’s Code Enforcement team. Small local platforms are also added to the list of monitored websites when they are identified.
“It’s like once you post something online, it never goes away and it’s in the cloud,” Torres said. “Once you post your short-term rental online somewhere, it’s going to stay there and eventually someone will find it.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
