Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. In order, this is the June 11th, 2024 General Government and Planning Committee, the Urban County Council. Our first item on the agenda is approval of the May 7th committee summary. Chair will entertain a motion? So moved. Second. Motion is second. Is any comment or question? Hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you, that passes. The next item is our partial report out, excuse me, from the public input subcommittee. as related to council rules for public comment. Councilmember Legree is the chair of that subcommittee. If you have any introductory comments, please go ahead and then we'll turn it over to Jennifer. Thank you so much, Chair. Colleagues, before Ms. Sutton begins her presentation, I want to go ahead and thank the members of this subcommittee and our staff for their hard work getting us to this point. This is our second presentation in front of you all. And thank you to Vice Mayor Wu, to Council Member Ellinger, to Council Member Sheehan, and to Council Member Lynch for your months of hard work on this committee. In tandem with our council core staff, our Department of Law, and leaders in our public information offices, government communications, and CIO, and with the input and guidance of our report from Civic Lex. We're bringing forward recommendations that continue to modernize and update our public engagement practices. You'll see that over the past year, we've been working to expand opportunities and methods for residents to be able to provide input to council through the work of our subcommittee, including more outward facing events and educational materials. In this presentation, you'll learn more about online tools like Engage Lexington and the work of our public information officer and initiatives that we have in the works to share information and resources within the community in even more dynamic and connected ways. We also have information about potentially clarifying the practice of live public comment. And we're interested in your conversation and input. So thank you, and I'll turn it over to you, Ms. Sutton. Good afternoon, everyone. So today, before you, we have a partial report out from the public input subcommittee. Some of this information is going to be a recap of what you all heard back in August. Here are the subcommittee members again and the staff who have also worked with the subcommittee on this information. As a reminder, the purpose of the subcommittee has been to review, update, and improve the public input process for council and to hopefully make it easier for residents to access information and engage with council members. We have a couple bullet points of where are the subcommittee's scope of work. Some are in progress still, and one item has been officially completed. The in-progress items are, again, to review and modernize the public input process, review and update the current public input resident guidelines and expectations, create a marketing and education plan for residents, and to provide periodic updates to this committee. The completed item pertains to Engage Lexington, which is research and select an engagement platform for implementation. Here is a recap of our meeting dates, and any additional meeting information and materials can be viewed at that hyperlinked site. And to kind of refresh your all's memory of the changes that have already been implemented, prior to the August 15th presentation, the subcommittee worked on addressing typos and gendered language. They updated the formatting and organization of the guidelines, just provided general clarification and developed and implemented a new electronic sign-in process. addressed yielding of time and implemented a few public comment restrictions. So the new updates that we have for you all today is an overview of the public information officer and what she has been working on as well as our public input web page. Our new technology, so engagement HQ, which is also known as Engage Lexington and the Gov delivery software. We've also been, we are in the beginning stages of developing different education outreach through the issue expo which we'll touch on later. And then we have a few additional technology policy changes. So Jillian Reisman, she is our new public information officer. She began in January of 2024. She's been managing our electronic sign-in process. She's also developed and run some social media campaigns. So recently she has provided information on the budget, engaged Lexington, NDFs, and provides a weekly schedule update for folks. She also develops the council comment newsletter and has created resources for council offices for your office and staff to use. So these are graphics, various one-pagers and issue-specific social media toolkits. She also manages our website and our public input webpage, so this is where you can find additional information on parking, public comment. It also links to Engage Lexington, different information about subcommittees and volunteer opportunities. I believe when we came to you all last August, the public input website was about to be completed or had just recently been completed, so we wanted to remind you all what that link is and kind of give you a screen grab of it so you can see what it looks like. So this is different than Engage Lexington. This lives on our website. So Jillian also has put together an annual report for utilizing all of the data for the public input sign-ins that we've received electronically since we implemented this process back in April of 2023. So for that entire year, we had 371 unique individuals across 61 different meetings. Of those people, only 80% signed in one time. For council meetings specifically, there were 183 participants across 26 council meetings. 18% of participants yielded their time across all meetings. And then of the 103 residents who spoke at work sessions, 72% spoke about an item on the agenda. And I'd also like to mention that back in March, we recently added additional, so we adjusted the form so when people are signing up for council meeting public comment, we are asking them if their issue is on the agenda or off the agenda, but that is just for us to gather informational purposes that isn't just so we can have that data to hopefully inform future decisions. And you can see this graph right here just kind of demonstrates the spread of participants across districts. So going to our new technology, we launched Engage Lexington on April 22, 2024, with two projects with short-term rentals and the fiscal year 2025 budget. Both of those hosted surveys, and you all will hear later today about the short-term rental survey results. This information is a little dated, so in the last week or so since the PowerPoint has been completed, so we actually almost have 4,000 visits to the site with over 400 contributions and over 600 registrations, and our engagement rate is 13.2%. And according to Granicus, when we've been working with our team, a good engagement rate is 7 to 10%, so we were doing really, really well with having folks contact us, reach out, provide feedback on this site. For the GovDelivery software, that is the newsletter software that your all's offices have access to. We are in the implementation phase of that. So the next thing that the subcommittee has been working on is additional education and outreach materials and events and ideas. And so one item with the help of Civic Lex that we've kind of honed in on is the Issue Expo. And the idea of the Issue Expo is it is a tabling event where community members can drop in over the course of several hours and engage with and learn from and speak with different stakeholders about a specific issue. So right now, we are in the process of picking a topic and creating a timeline and beginning the stages of planning that event for hopefully mid to late fall. So we also have additional technology policy change recommendations. So we have an updated USB policy. So this, and I'll touch on this in the next slide, but this prohibits all portable digital media rather than stating just USBs. So that kind of broadens it to hopefully capture future technology that might impact us. And then also clarifying the public comment guidelines to explain that public comment is a time for residents to share spoken comments to council. So this would involve amendments to sections 3.106 and 3.107 of council rules and procedures. We've also rearranged the order of the guidelines just a little bit for clarification purposes. And again, we'll add no USB devices will be accepted and then add the or other portable digital media to keep that relevant as technology changes. And then additionally, adding clarification that public comment is a time to share an individual's spoken comments rather than present multimedia materials like PowerPoints. So these materials, I would like to emphasize that these materials can still be shared with council members in the form of physical handouts, or they can also be shared via email to council members as well. So the next steps that we have for the subcommittee is kind of continuing down this implementation and evaluation path with the technology that we've implemented and the systems we've implemented, and then also building on some of these educational and outreach events. So one thing that I know the subcommittee is interested in looking about is looking at where public comment falls on the agenda in council meetings, which is why we're starting to collect that data. And then looking to also develop new and ongoing engaged Lexington projects to continue to utilize that platform and solicit information and feedback from the community. continue to develop educational outreach materials and then those outreach events like the issue expo and kind of continue exploring those options open it up for questions thank you miss Sutton and as we have folks sign in for questions if any just say I appreciate the work of the subcommittee and all the staff it's clear that you all put in a lot of time and thought to this and then particularly seeing the public engagement aspects with the technology improvements and engagement efforts i think have been what we really set out for when we when we established this subcommittee and thank you for that so are there any questions or comments council member baxter thank you chair um i don't really have a question i just have a comment and i just want to thank everybody from the subcommittee for your hard work i hope that our community can see that we are working hard to improve and add avenues for public engagement as we travel around and do research on other cities we have found that a lot of places are far more restrictive than we are so i'm i'm really proud of the work that we're doing and just want to thank you all for your hard work thank you chair thank you councilmember reynolds thank you chair and yes i want to thank um the group that worked on this as well it's not easy we're trying to be transparent and open and allow our constituents to have time to comment yet we are in the constraints of certain meetings and so I just appreciate everybody's work I guess I just had a few questions when you all were talking did you look at some of civic reccomendations especially to maybe allowing specific other times for public comments either maybe limiting our public comment amount of time in a meeting or in adding another additional time for comment or anything like that I'd be glad to answer that yes so if you all remember it may have even been a A couple of years ago, during our previous iteration of council, we had a report out from Civic Lex about some survey information they gathered from the community. And they had a set of recommendations that included the idea of creating other spaces, forums, times for the public to engage with council. We have talked about how around big issues, things like ADU, short term rentals, etc. We, as a council body, have created some special forums for people to give input. We know that that's a really good tool and we recommend keeping that on the table and using it as the council sees fit. We also started to explore, Council Member Reynolds, some of what you've talked about, brand new avenues with our issue expo idea and then also with another idea that we are working through with committee preview items. So that is a little bit more complicated because we want to work through public notice, how to best go about this. If we're going to be doing meetings and gatherings for public engagement in other spaces at our city hall, how we would use Lex TV or make sure that those spaces are accessible. So we have been talking about beyond the issue expo, what other ways we could pursue that recommendation of Civic Lex. But we know that it might take a little bit more research and maneuvering in terms of where, when, and how. So thank you for asking about that. Thank you. And the only other comment I just wanted to recommend is that we've been traveling and we've seen what some other council do in terms of presenting their council rules. And one thing that I really like that we saw recently was they blew up their rules, what they had decided on, and put it on kind of like a standing banner right by the inside. And I just really want to formally recommend that, that we do that. I think it's really helpful. They also had their council members blown up with the outline of their district in one city. And so I think that you all have done great work, and it would be awesome to be able to display that very clearly for everybody as they come in the door. So thank you. Thank you, council member. Sorry about that, chair. I was just going to say thank you. That's great feedback, and we can find out what it would take to make those materials happen. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Lynch. Thank you, Chair. I just want to thank first Councilmember Legree for spearheading our group. You have intentionally led some really insightful discussions, well organized, and we've done a lot of great things. I'm very proud of the work we've done thus far. And I'm looking forward to us diving into more of the work as well in the future. Thank you to Jennifer for culminating all of our many, many, many, many complex discussions into a really great presentation. Thank you for your work on that. I just want to say encourage my colleagues, Jennifer talked about the Issue Expo. We're going to need some help with that. So we'll be calling on all of you to help us bring the Issue Expo to fruition this fall, because we want to make sure that we have a public engagement opportunity regarding issues that are before us and that are relevant to our neighbors. So we'll be calling on you all, so don't ignore the email, don't hang up on the phone call, don't ignore the text message. We will need your help for this Issues Expo in the fall. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Sevigny. Thank you, Chair. And thanks for the great presentation. And I really want to echo the work that you all have done on this. It's very intentional. You've done a great job. I had just one question on the electronic sign in. I would just, I would love to have an email field in there or phone field that are required because I want to be able to I want to be able to actually reach out and contact someone that's from my district that responds and and the other thing we saw at a recent city visit because a lot of people don't know their district and so I think they're they're winging it a bit when they're up there which is understandable that not everyone knows where they're where the district is I think it would help to have a map of the districts someplace did you say that okay okay all right i was listening to jennifer when she said that that's that's just my input thank you thank you council member council member james brown thank you chair and and thank you jennifer for the presentation and um and council member lagree and the the work group for their work on this my question is is have there been some conversation and the work group or about making these policies consistent across all public meetings that are happening at city hall planning commission board of adjustments or any other meetings that that people can kind of just generalizes government meetings so uh i don't I don't want to speak for the chair of the subcommittee, but having been in a few of those meetings, I know that those discussions have been had, and any of the subcommittee members, please feel free to jump in, particularly as related to some of the recommendation of Civic Lex. But it was acknowledged that each of those entities has its own bylaws and rules, and that we really only have purview when it comes to procedure of our own rules. and so to the extent limited by that I think that is kind of where the conversation went but it looks like the Vice Mayor looks like he'd like to jump in on that. Thank you Chair. Yeah this came up for me personally when I started chairing zone change hearings and realizing that to the public who are coming to a zone change hearing with Planning Commission in the same room and then coming to another zone change hearing shared by us in the same room, that our rules were different, especially when it came to comments and engagement. So I think our inclination in our discussions was we're still kind of working on formalizing and codifying our rules, and then I would love to see us kind of, once we solidify all that, take that to these other groups who we don't have jurisdiction over, but to say, hey, here are our best practices, and we would love for you to consider this just from a sort of a customer service engagement point of view, that folks walking into this room, they don't necessarily have to make the distinction between this is one group versus another group, that there are fairly consistent rules about how they can engage in this room with meetings. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. And that certainly extended what I was trying to say there even further, that by us establishing what we would hope to be best practices in the city, then hopefully those other boards and commissions and entities might say, for the sake of consistency, they would do the same. Okay. Yeah, and I appreciate that answer and that consideration. I think it just would be beneficial if we could try to do all we can to be consistent, because sometimes those folks start at those meetings, they lead to us, and if the rules are different, I can see where frustration was set in, and I think we want to try to avoid that. So thanks for the work on this. Thank you. Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to express my gratitude to the subcommittee for all of your hard work. And as we did see when we went on, many of us went on the Commerce Lexington leadership trip, Other cities do have a very tight amount of time for residents to speak, and I feel that we're doing a great job in having a balance and ensuring that we have residents have an opportunity to voice their concerns and with our own schedules, if that makes sense. So thank you to the subcommittee for all your hard work. We do appreciate you. Thank you. Seeing no one else signed in, committee members, the resolution and revisions to our rules can be found on pages 19, 20, and 21 of the packet. The chair would entertain a motion to approve these changes and move forward to the full council. We have a motion and a second. Any discussion or comment on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you, that motion passes. Then I would put to the committee's preference the option of reporting this out today. This committee does not have a scheduled meeting again until September. And while we may have issues that come up throughout the summer that we would look to call a special called meeting, in our normal course, this would not be reported out until September, which would be two months' worth of meetings that then our new rules related to public comment would not apply. So it would be my preference to go ahead and move this forward so that our work is affected as quickly as possible, but that would be the preference of the committee. So I would entertain a motion for a report out. Fair, I'll make a motion to report out today. Second. Thank you. There's a motion to second. Any discussion on that motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you very much, and thank you again to the subcommittee and for all for their discussion, and thank you very much, Ms. Sutton, for all your hard work. Next on our list, on our agenda today, is an update on the short-term rentals policy with our review, and this would, I look to Council Member James Brown, you're slated to lead us in on this if you would like. Thank you, Chair, and I'm going to defer to Council Member Sheehan to kind of open us up, and I'll work to close us out. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. So I have a list of folks that I would like to quickly thank as well, including Council Member James Brown for his leadership on this. It's been nice to work with you on this issue. I'd also like to thank Jennifer Sutton and Kendra Thompson from our core staff because they have been working extensively. And you're going to hear from Jennifer in a moment on some of the data that we've collected through Engage Lexington. And then folks in planning, revenue, and law, several of them are here, so I want to say thank you all. I know we have Director Holbrook who's going to present today as well. We passed this policy in July 2023, almost a year ago, and given how complex the short term rental issue is, we committed to reviewing the policy to ensure that it was the best fit for Lexington. So the presentation and discussion that we will have today is a part of that review process. As I said, we have Jennifer Sutton who will be presenting a summary of the responses that we received through our new platform, Engage Lexington. we have all heard from community members as well um... over the last year and prior to that about short-term rentals i'm will hear a little bit about the current registrations to revenue and some of that enforcement that has been taking place and then uh... we will discuss as a committee what areas you are the like us to consider as council member brown and i work on this evaluation and make potential changes to the policy so i think you are uh... as colleagues for the later discussion that we'll have, but then also your participation in this process as a whole. So I'll turn it over for our presentation. Thank you, Director. Thank you, Council Member. So as Council Member Sheehan touched on, and you can see on the slide, the policy and implementation timeline of this ordinance was that it was passed July 11th, 2023, and then we had a six-month grace period for STR operators to get their zoning compliance and then to register with Division of Revenue. On January 11, 2024, we started working on identifying operators that were not licensed with the city and then investigating and enforcing on those non-compliant operators. In the meantime, we've also done an RFP process where we've selected Granicus through the RFP to get software to track and help provide compliance on short-term rentals that aren't operating per the ordinance. That software project is underway, and that's something we've got that's going to help us once we get probably into the next fiscal year. And then, as Councilmember mentioned, you had the Engaged Lexington public engagement tool that gave a survey that gave a lot of additional feedback on the current STR policy. And so that'll be what Jennifer Sutton will go through first, and then we'll talk about some of this enforcement and then what this process will look like going forward. All right, so Engage Lexington hosted a short-term rental survey, and before I kind of get into the summary of the survey, I just want to mention that after the committee meeting today, I will be sharing the report that we've written about the survey results, so you will have that information. And then we've also compiled district-specific reports. So you'll get a folder that will have kind of a brief overview that our system spits out and then an Excel spreadsheet with information that was from the survey. That's kind of more in-depth on what people have said. So the survey was hosted on Engage Lexington from April 22nd to May 24th. It was also hosted on an informational webpage on the site, so that page also had educational information, documents, links back to our site about short-term rentals, and then an overall lifecycle of the policy. We had 353 total responses. District 5 had the most, and then District 3 was second, and then District 10 had the third most. So, and then you can see the breakdown per district in that chart right there. And all of this information, again, is in the report that I'll send to you all after the committee. So, with the, one of the questions that we had on the survey was about awareness, and if people were aware of a short-term rental in their neighborhood, and 71% of respondents were aware of a short-term rental existing in their neighborhood, 29% were not aware. And then 56% of respondents have not had complaints or issues with short-term rentals in their neighborhood, and then 44% of respondents had complaints. So if individuals selected that they had a complaint, they were prompted to provide additional information, and these were the top five complaints that we saw. noise was number one, parking was number two, and parties was number three. Public safety concerns was number four, and those are kind of general. Anything that had to do with public safety concerns were kind of put into that category. And then trash was the fifth most complaint. So the next part of the survey, we split it up into urban and suburban policy area rankings. So we provided everyone with a list of 13 policy areas where they could rank which one they've, what that was most important to them, one being the most important and 13 being the least important. And so we divided it up between urban and suburban areas and then we had a rural area as well. And so with the urban and suburban rankings, the area that had the most top numbers of times ranked as the top priority was the noise limits and quiet areas. And that is when they were ranked number one in the list, the actual count of that number. And then notifications to neighbors when a short-term rental permit is issued with owner contact information, that was ranked number two. So that had the second most top priority rankings. So then we had the rural area policy rankings, and this was not a mandated question, so we have fewer responses on this one. So there are 262 responses. And the policy area that had the highest number was notifications to neighbors, so that is actually flipped from the urban and suburban area with noise limits and quiet areas as the second most. We also had a couple questions on there for owners and operators. And so if they responded that they, yes, they were indeed an owner or operator, they were prompted with a few more questions. So we had 17 respondents for these. All of those respondents operated their STRs by owner as opposed to a management company, and the majority of them offered detached whole single-family homes. So the final question on the survey, we asked respondents what else they would like to see addressed in Lexington's STR recommendation. So this was a text box. It was very broad. And then we manually coded for the themes for what we saw frequently throughout the survey. And density restrictions overwhelmingly we saw had the most, so 127 times it was mentioned. And then we had 48 responses that mentioned affordable and available housing concerns. And then 22 responses mentioned a variety of unhosted or hosted restrictions. and that is across the urban and suburban area and the rural area too. And again, all of this information will be shared in more detail later after the committee. I think that's everything. Just to look at where we are with compliance on short-term rentals as of June 2024, we have 625 licensed short-term rentals. that these have been through the Board of Adjustment or have gotten their zoning compliance permit prior to January 11th. For those that have not been compliant with the policy, we have sent hundreds of notices, 339 first notices and 154 second notices of violation. And these were almost exclusively units that had gotten their zoning compliance but had not come and registered with revenue. And so these were instructions to tell them to take down their listings and to come and get registered. You've already, you know, you've already got your zoning compliance. In a lot of ways, that was the part with the deadline and the grandfathering in, or you've been through the Board of Adjustment. And so ours is really trying to fill out this paperwork and get them their license number. The citations issued, it's actually half this number. So between the time that we had to submit these slides and when the notice period ended for some of these citations, some people came in and actually got registered or took their listings down. So it's closer to 10 citations that have actually been issued because people were able to come in and get those issues rectified before the letters went out the door. So it looks higher than it actually is, but we have issued some citations, and those are, again, for people who have been operating without a license. As far as additional policy recommendations, we've got just through our conversations with planning and with council members and administering the policy, I know planning has had some suggestions they've come up with for what we might want to look at for recommendations for amending the policy and the ordinance. And we've had some just through our operations and things that we've seen to be particularly challenging. And then I know that, of course, council may have some considerations from speaking with your constituents or in talking amongst each other. So I'm happy to turn it back over to Council Member Sheehan or Council Member Brown to talk about what the next steps might be. Thank you. Thank you, Wes. And thank you, Jennifer, for the presentation. Committee members in your packet, you'll see next steps. And I think our plans would be to come back to this committee with a revised ordinance for this committee to consider to move on to the full council. And then the full council would move the revised ordinance onto our planning commission, where they would have a public hearing and make recommendations or changes to the policy. And then it would come back to council to review whatever changes they make and adopt it going forward. So what we're asking you today, and I'll say this to the folks listening to the meeting, the survey was just another opportunity to engage the community about the policy, operators and residents. So that's a snapshot of information that we can use as we review this policy. But please continue to communicate with council members, our staff, about changes or recommendations they would make to this policy or you would suggest. because we we continue to get feedback and communication and take it and are taking it in consideration but and would appreciate more but then today i think we would just ask committee members to also uh... share with us and and list out some recommendations of some policy considerations uh... that we can take into consideration as we go forward thank you thank you council member uh... told repassion thank you again uh... So being no action item to be taken on this today, but we've got an invitation to discuss this. And so if we have any questions on the presentation or any comments that anyone would like to make, we'll start with Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Thank you all for the work that you've done on this piece. Mr. Holbrook, I have a question for you. On the compliance page, you mentioned the majority of the, Did you say the majority of the first notice or the second notice? Both. What we realized when we sent out the first notices was that a vast majority of these people did not realize they hadn't completed the process. They thought getting their zoning compliance permit was it, and that was the permit that they needed. And so they still had this second piece that they had to come through with our office. And so this was really just an opportunity to provide some further education to those individuals so they could get compliant with the ordinance. Yeah, and that's always my inclination rather than to penalize folks is to get folks, help folks get into compliance. Are there steps that we're taking that can kind of take that obstacle out or make it more easy or apparent that it is a two-step process? I know in talking with planning, since everything does have to go through the Board of Adjustment now, there is communication with the applicants that this is not it. We reach out to the applicants once they've gotten their zoning or their conditional use. We're monitoring that as those approvals happen, just to make sure that we're providing them the opportunity to follow through the full extent of the ordinance. In terms of like a two-step process, is it that one has to happen before the other? Yes, sir. In order to get your license, you have to have your zoning approval, your planning approval. Is there any way, I'm thinking just kind of from a customer service point of view, is there any way for an applicant to come in and basically fill out both applications at the same time, and then we go through the normal process of approving one and then approving the other, and letting them know, you know, if one doesn't get approved? The way the ordinance is set up right now, and I can defer to planning as far as what their process looks like, But the zoning approval is required as part of their application to us. They could make the full application other than that piece and provide it, and it could be pending this approval through the Board of Adjustment. But they would still have to go through the planning process even if they did that piece as well. Yeah. I just wonder, and I don't know if this would be a piece of modifying the ordinance or not, But just to me, any step that we can take to kind of make it an easier process for applicants, especially that we are seeing, you know, hundreds of folks who are missing that second piece, most likely not on purpose because they're obviously trying to get into compliance. I think that's what we've seen is, and you can see the difference between the number of people who had to receive a second notice and how many have received the first. They get the first and they see notice of violation, and they typically do come and get registered pretty quickly. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. And thank you to my colleagues once again for working on this. I know that this is a very difficult thing to tackle. And I had a few questions. One, does planning or does anyone have a number of housing units that we have in Lexington? So, we previously, we had about 800 short-term rentals. I think, and now I saw the number up there of what we have currently registered. Compared to how many housing units do we have in Lexington? We don't have exact numbers. Based on the data that we have, we think it's somewhere around 150,000. 150,000, okay. So we still have a very small percentage of short-term rentals compared to our housing. Right, so there are 600-some that are fully licensed right now. So we do expect that there are others that are operating and, you know, have not come into compliance yet. So we don't know that we're at a plateau per se. Okay. And how do you all feel like the process has gone at getting people through it all the way? So one complaint that I heard from some constituents was that it was pretty challenging, especially if they had multiple units and that there were some hiccups along the way. Do you all feel like there's some ways to streamline it to be able to get more people all the way through the process? I think that as long as unhosted short-term rentals are all going through the board of adjustment process, that step is, you know, rightfully so a bit of a process because it involves a public hearing and notice to neighbors and that kind of thing. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, not that part of the process. more the revenue and having to pay for all of the units. Gotcha. That may be a better question for Wes. I think to the extent that we can, we do allow people to have one application for all of the units that they operate. The one challenge that we run into is that because the licensees are based on the property owner and not necessarily the operator if you have different property owners for one operator's units then they're different licensees and so those are different applications and they have to pay different um fees so uh yeah so if um if you have if you have operator a uh and they are having their property that they own and then other properties that they manage those are two separate separate applications that they would have to make the first unit would have a $200 fee under each one and then a hundred dollars for each subsequent unit. And is there a way that we could explain that a little bit more in detail to folks? Because I think that was one of the main hiccups that people have run into. I think it's a little bit of education when they get to us because we do try and explain, you know, where the license actually needs to be held. we can we can attempt to do that on the front end but we do try and take the time to explain why they have to have separate licenses let's say if they're operating property zone by two separate people and why it's not just under them as the operator or some LLC or other business okay because well anyway I just wanted to bring up that that was one issue that some of my constituents had encountered that was problematic. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for this update. A few clarifying questions here. The application process, as Council Member Reynolds is talking about, trying to streamline that particular process, can that only be done in person or can it be done online? Once we get our software up and running, it can be done online. Do you have an ETA? I don't have an ETA, but one of the things we're working on, and this goes into another software project, is just making sure you can make your payment online as well. And so that's a part of this that's going to make it maybe take a few weeks longer than it might otherwise. Okay. And then this might be an Autumn question. So this is on the heels of me watching the BOA hearing yesterday, and we had several tie votes. Yes. And so I am wondering what that means for the applicant. Is there a waiting period to reapply? Are they done? What's that process look like? Sure. So when there is a tie vote, the board neither approves nor disapproves the conditional use. Typically, if the board, if they do have an action, an approval or a disapproval, the applicant would have to wait one year before they could reapply, and it would also trigger their 30-day appeal process to circuit court. when there's a tie and a fail and nothing really happens, they can reapply the next month. Okay, so they could request another hearing immediately. Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you. And I think just watching the hearing yesterday made it really clear that we probably do need to set some more, I don't want to say strict parameters, but allows our BOA members to vote with a little more certainty. i think there's a lot of questions still so i don't know what exactly that looks like in practice but as we're looking at policy changes um you know if they maybe consulting with you and seeing like what some of their major concerns have been you know repetitively um so that we can address those and give them a little bit more guidance because i it just felt like they didn't have all the information that they needed to make an educated decision so that's my feedback thank you chair Thank you. Council Member Plumman. Thank you, Chair, and thanks to everyone that's worked on these short term rentals. I couldn't believe when I looked at the date that it's been a year. It didn't seem like it was that long ago. I had a couple questions. And when we first started down this path, what was the projected number of short term rentals that we thought we had inside the urban service boundary? I think based on the data that we saw just on listings that were being advertised, it was around 1200 to 1400. Okay, we have like 600 that actually- We've got 600 that are legally operating. I just wonder if perhaps another date could be considered as a second chance, just because of the magnitude of all the short term rentals out there that have not. And that the burden or the pressure, the frequency that's having to go to the BOA. And that's just a thought that I've given to the whole process. But because a lot of folks have said to me, I didn't know about the registration date. And I know you have six months in the presentation, but the reality was that you had the holidays. I question how much it got out there. So that might be a consideration to kind of have a second opportunity to register. And then the third thing I want to ask is the Granicus software. How does that work? How are you flagging and touching all the? Right, so they have a support team that works with their software and then they also use the software to scrub the listings and try and match it up to any sort of identifiable information that they can. Based on the area, if they have a picture that is closely resembling what's in the PVA database or what you can see online. If those two match, then that provides some certainty that that's the same property that may be operating. And then it has some automation for letters for application process and for payment. So that'll take what we've basically been doing manually with staff time and automate a lot of that process. So it does speed that up. Should, yes. So do you work like with VRBO and you work with, I've worked with some of the other ones, Airbnb and then cross reference some of that with the PVA? They pull the information off of there, what their exact arrangement is with those platforms. And then all the other platforms that they look at, I'm not sure, but they do get that information. They do get the listings and the pictures. And they document those and then keep an audit trail so we can see when stays were happening based on reviews. when it was booked or when it wasn't available to be booked. And that helps provide some certainty that they might have been operating without a license. Okay, thank you. And can I get a clarification on next step outside in the rural area? Council member? Yes, ma'am. I think the next step is for the council to weigh into the policy that was recommended to us from the rural land management and send that to the planning commission so they can have a a chance to review and make changes uh... i do and this isn't just me personally think that these two policies need to be separate i think what uh... i think the the rural area is and how folks think about that and how we treat that area is completely different from the urban area and what and what we can do so i think those policies need to be two separate policies and i agree i just wondered how soon are we going to be able to do that we're going to have to wait till september to come back about the rural potentially potentially okay because you know i'm getting a lot of comments on on some of the world and they're kind of like limbo right now because number one they weren't allowed out there number two they're out there and number three they're not fitting into the into the what's come back to us so they're still in limbo in september September. Just a quick question, are you hearing from short term rental operators in the rural area or are you hearing from residents? Operators. Operators, yeah, okay. All right, that's all my questions, thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Lynch. Thank you, Chair. I just have a couple of questions about the additional policy recommendations from the Division of Planning and Division of Revenue. So my first question is for planning that you state that a recommendation you have is requiring that the use be commenced in a certain time period. So are you seeing a lag time? Can you give me some context for that one? Yeah, so that's something that we've been talking about, whether it would be appropriate for once to maybe cure some of the lag between when we're issuing a zoning compliance permit and when revenue is getting a license application. That if you have to act within a certain amount of time that you would lose that status. And also, whenever the board is evaluating these, they're really looking at the concentration of short-term rentals in the area of the one that they're looking at to see if there are too many, perhaps, in that area. So right now, we just have information about whether or not there are licensed or zoning compliance permits out there for those units. But if they're not really being used, we don't necessarily know that. So having a little bit better data about what's actually being used as a short term rental. I think from what I understand from operators and just some anecdotal comments, there's an expectation that somebody might want to do this for a while and they might try it. And maybe the house that they thought was in a really great area for short term rental really isn't and they switched to a long term rental option. So just being able to kind of keep better track of that. And we think that kind of setting an expiration date would help us with that. Gotcha. And then the space requirement? Spacing requirement is something that we're hearing a lot from neighbors. Other communities have spacing requirements. Louisville has a spacing requirement. Theirs is 600 feet for unhosted short-term rentals, and then they have some very specific items that can allow that to be reduced, but only in some really particular circumstances. We hear a lot from neighbors that maybe they have one on either side of them or that their neighborhood has too many. So we're really trying to look at our policy now is pretty broad. It just references in proximity, too. And that's really tricky to say, what does proximity mean? Because that will mean something different to everyone. So establishing a spacing requirement, we think, will help with kind of making sure that these are better dispersed in the community. Okay. Thank you. And then as far as the Division of Revenue recommendations, just reasoning for those two proposals. Yeah, so one of the things that we've seen is whenever someone has a building or might break up their house or a duplex into multiple listings, either you could rent the whole duplex or one side or the other side and it alternates, that creates a little bit of confusion when it comes to the licensure, especially if it might have different parcel IDs. And so thinking through what that might look like and how we might be able to streamline that So you don't necessarily have three licenses when it's all under the same roof. I think that's something that might provide a little bit of streamlining for the operators, especially if they do have a self-contained property. And then on the hosted side, one of the things that we've seen, I think in looking at hosted rentals, people look at those maybe a little more favorably because they're supposed to be someone on site. But we've gotten several complaints that there is not a host at these hosted rentals. and you look at some and their listing on the platform shows that they live in another city. The property might have corporate ownership under the PVA. You may not have a different emergency contact than the person on the listing that says they live in another city, and there's never anyone there. They're renting the whole house. I think that's another indication that it might not be hosted. And so that's one of the things that we've seen and had several complaints about. So we want to look at maybe some other ways to verify that for the people that truly do have hosted rentals. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Gray. Thank you, Chair. So just piggybacking off of what you were just saying to Councilmember Lynch, Director Hallbrook. So how do we follow up on when we know that they're, for a fact, fabricating facts, which means a lie? What are we doing? What is the city able to do? So the, and I'm going to start dipping my toe into planning here for a second. So come and save me if I get too deep. Just dip. Yeah. So with their zoning, they are zoned. Their zoning compliance is for a hosted short-term rental. And so in these instances, we work with building inspection who goes and investigates some of those claims and tries to verify whether it does meet the requirements for being hosted or not. If you don't have zoning compliance, you can't have a short-term rental license. And so if for some reason their zoning compliance might get pulled, then their short-term rental license would be revoked as well. otherwise we might look at it you know if there are issues that the short-term rental that aren't being resolved whether it's trash whether it's any other sort of nuisance complaint that that could be something else that we could look at as far as if we get enough of those that might go to revoking their license to operate if you leave your trash out three or four days past when it's supposed to be picked up you probably aren't there you would think um you um also um this is a question regarding planning um currently you know in the sixth district we have had many complaints as usual regarding uh short-term rentals um how are we um are is there are there Are there regulations in how many short term rentals we can have on one street? No, so currently the zoning ordinance regulations give guidance to the Board of Adjustment that they should consider the number of short term rentals in proximity to the one that they are taking under consideration at that time. In proximity, as I mentioned to Councilmember Lynch, is really pretty subjective. Our staff has been evaluating the number of short-term rentals that are within 1,000 feet whenever we're writing our staff reports, just because we were trying to drill down what proximity might mean and thought that that would be a good place to start. So that's what we're kind of evaluating when we're looking at a staff report. But I think some extra guidance as to what an appropriate number or spacing requirement or concentration might be in a certain geographic area would be very helpful. and earlier one of my colleagues mentioned that perhaps the urban and the rural should be treated differently i am of the the stance of that everyone should be treated the same and that's just me um what um of your unhosted in lexington because i know currently with our talks with the overall, theirs is to be unhosted, or am I correct? Hosted, excuse me, I knew it was hosted. So in the urban area with our hosted versus unhosted, have you seen a difference in the number of complaints that you have received or? Wes may be able to touch on that as well. I think the biggest issue with the hosted is that they're not really hosted sometimes, And I think that that stems from potential misunderstandings when they were being grandfathered in as to what hosted or unhosted was. And potentially some folks are trying to bend the rules. The vast majority of short-term rentals that have been approved so far, about 95% are unhosted. And so those that we have, we still have a large number of rogue law workers living on the edge folk who have not gone through the process. What are we doing or do we have anything set up to where we're going to go ahead and how are we going to find these unregulated Airbnbs or whatever they are, Verbu, whatever? Sure. So right now we're relying mostly on, you know, complaints and comments that, hey, there's the short terminal here. Does it have a license? Yes or no? And when we say, you know, it doesn't, if I'm the one taking the call, I'm sharing that information with our zoning enforcement staff and with revenue. and then I think the software will be a big component to this as well when it's able to scrub the listings and Wes may be able to touch on that as well. And lastly, sorry I cut you off Wes, but as it relates to someone such as myself that is on the market for a house, let me just tell you short-term rentals aren't helping me find a house that I can't afford. So in planning I guess when we talk about short-term rentals, is there a way to discern or how are we able to balance and weigh the number of homes that are actually for sale for individuals that reside in Lexington or who would love to reside in Lexington in short-term rentals? I don't think I can answer that. I think that's a question about the policy and the policy that we have right now doesn't really give us the ability to make that call, I guess. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Sevigny. Thank you, Chair. I've just got several different things I just want to run through. I too kind of feel like, because I'm on the Rural Land Management Board, I'd really like to make sure that the rural area is considered at the same time. I feel like we've delayed that long enough, and I just want to, if we're going to work on this, let's just work on it and get it done with. And it can be looked at differently, but I just want to get it over with. Density restrictions do seem like, according to the report, and thank you for the report, by the way, that it's great work. The density restrictions seems to be the write-in, and it seems to be of most concern to the most people. so I think if we don't address it it's it's gonna be probably it'll be a personal problem with me like I wanted it addressed I don't I don't necessarily have a great way to do it I do think a distance limitation is okay I do think drawing a circle around the property and say if there's X number within this it's a problem so I just want to make sure that we consider that on the applicant side. Wes, I too had gotten some feedback and the basic issues are there are owners who, that own their property personally because they have a personal bank note on the property and then they have an LLC that's running the business. The LLC is owned by the same owners that own the property. So I would just like to see something to address that oddity. And I don't know if you already have some ideas. And then there's a whole liability insurance issue. I think the liability insurance could be held by one of those entities as long as we had something to sink our teeth in. You can give me a quick response on that if you think you if there is one on on the liability insurance item one of the things that we discovered through this is if you list on airbnb and i don't know if the same for vrbo but airbnb does provide liability insurance for the operators now people have chosen to get their own insurance policies for a variety of reasons but that is one thing that we do know exists and as long as that policy doesn't change on the company's part the units are insured and so that's that's something that we could look at maybe streamlining knowing that the policy exists that'd be great that'd be fantastic um the other thing is um some jurisdictions are doing um the affordable housing was the second most um this that you know and and housing stock was the second most write-in comment and some jurisdictions are doing it an affordable housing fee or tax and it seems like something that Airbnb is aware of because they if you look at their publications there they're realizing that the house the housing there is a housing shortage and they're trying to they're trying to deal with that in in some form or fashion and I don't know if But is that something that could be levied or not? I think that's probably a question for the law department. And then my last question is, does a hotel and motel, do they pay on the first dollar of profit tax? Do they pay net profit tax on the first dollar of profit? We do have some hotel and motel agencies that pay. They also pay the transient room tax which goes to fund. Right. But the net profits tax itself is paid on the first dollar in a hotel or motel. On hotel motel, yes. Is this related to the gross receipts? Yeah, this is basically related to the concept that an Airbnb, VRBO, short term rental, it is a business. It's nothing else but a business. if we're going to allow a business to run in a residential zone, it should be just treated like a business. It is not a long-term rental. It is not a standard rental. That's just a standard investment. It's a business. And I don't know where we would deal with the taxing of the profit on a short-term rental, but I kind of feel like it needs to be dealt with. Whenever we gave our initial presentation as far as short-term rentals, we have made the decision that if you are operating a short-term rental or a business that has to be regulated, because our regulations dictate that if you make $50,000 or less of gross receipts and you're a single member LLC or a sole proprietor, you are exempt from paying the net profits. we have taken the approach that if you are operating a regulated business, which a short-term rental is, that you need to verify to us by filing that you make less than $50,000 a year. And that's in our regulations. That's something that I think generally we'd like to take a look at going forward, because that was a challenge as well for some of the operators who had made less than $50,000, dollars and so they were exempt and so they weren't able to it took them some time to get those filings and because they had to go back years thank you thank you chair thank you councilmember account for james brown thank you chair I was just want to say some comments and close if you had some comments for for this I don't want to get in front of you no you go ahead but if you're gonna close should we first see if super host Ellinger has anything he'd like to add to the discussion. I'm not sure if I'm still required to recuse at this point because it's already passed and I am registered. I guess one of the things, with the new software, have you been able to find the difference between the 625 and the 1200 and where we stand with that? I know that question has been asked, but I didn't really get an answer there on that. Yeah, that's something we're still working through manual. we haven't gotten the data pull from the software yet. And one of the reasons that that process has taken a while is there was legislation in the state legislature that would have changed our ability to enforce our ordinance. And so we waited to see if that would pass before we brought the resolution to accept the Granica software to counsel. So that's something that we should have available pretty soon after we get this data input and start scrubbing it. But right now we're doing it based on complaints and then research in our office. Okay. As a hosted one, I feel like, you know, I am there, so if I ever have an issue, I can be addressed. So I think the hosted ones aren't going to have near, and I think you only said 5% of those were hosted? That's right, yes. And I guess probably the biggest issue we've had is, because I looked at getting one in Louisville, and it was across the street from Churchill Downs. And their rule, and there was only two in probably a three-mile radius, but there was one within 600 feet. And because of that, I wasn't allowed to do that. So I think probably the distance might be something we look at, but we also have to be realistic on how many, though, are in that area, too, because this one would have been a, right across the street would have been a good opportunity, but because of it, I didn't follow through. So I think distance is probably something, but I also think if we're going to deal with the urban miles, we need to do that rule too and be consistent with both in how we go about doing that. So there's some thoughts, but yes, I deal with this every day. I was doing laundry for my Airbnb earlier this morning, so yes, I deal with it. As I think Council Member Savigny said, it's a glorified cleaning service, And I do a lot of cleaning. I had six loads of laundry, more than you do, so it was fun. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Committee Members, for all the feedback that you gave us. I think it's going to be beneficial as we look to revise this policy going forward. And I just want to say thank you to Council Member Sheehan for working on this and Leighton in her office. And then especially our partners here in the planning department and revenue. I know this policy has been tough or just something new that we're having to change and kind of adjust and get used to going forward. But I appreciate everybody's help and support in doing that. And then the neighbors that are here as well, we hear you. Keep talking to us. We're going to keep looking at this policy and try to adjust it and make it better for Lexington. But I would be remiss to say that, maybe I shouldn't say this. But one of the concerns I have are the overreaction that we've seen on some of the policies that we make for Lexington. And I don't want that to happen to us on this policy. So I'll say that as coded as I can. Just to address some of the things that have been said today, this is allowing a commercial use in a residential area. So I do understand the thoughts and concerns about streamlining the process. But I still think if it's an unhosted unit that we do set some hurdles that people have to jump over. Because it is a commercial use in a residential area. We had talked about ways that we can make this process more administrative, either go or no go. But I don't think we want to do anything, myself and Councilmember Sheehan, to this policy that would take the neighbor's voice out of it. reason that we made unhosted conditional uses so they would have an opportunity to come talk to the folks that could allow that use or not allow that use and have their concerns heard and addressed I do appreciate the Board of Adjustment for their job in doing this and taking it on this and it's you know this is new to them especially the ones that go into it with an open mind and good intentions because we know that on a case-by-case basis these things are just different neighborhoods are different circumstances are different and i think the staff is doing their best to give them justification and guidance to approve or disapprove the short-term rental uh... i just think we're seeing a lot of inconsistency as that goes forward the other thing i'll say is uh... uh... the staff has made recommendations uh... based off of neighborhoods that are at risk so they are taking the affordability issue into consideration when they make recommendations to the board of adjustment. So that's not explicitly written into the policy, but I think that they are doing their due diligence and recognizing that's a concern and weighing in on that. So we have the next steps going forward kind of laid out. And if the chair has to schedule or sees fit to schedule a special meeting in between now and September, I think we'll try to work and get on that agenda if we're ready. So, thank you, Chair, thank you, committee members. Thank you, Councilmember. So that ends our discussion on that policy review. Again, no action to be taken today. So if we look to our items referred to committee, does anyone have any changes, requests to delete or move? Councilmember Lynch. Thank you, Chair. I would just like to uplift the item that's in committee, but It's up under the Boards and Commissions Comprehensive Review subheading. I don't know if you all may remember that about a year ago, Commissioner Charlie Lanter, based on some recommendations that a group of us had after some research, he established a tenant's advisory group and a landlord advisory group. And so I would like to get an annual report from them, so I would like to make that a separate committee item from the Boards and Commissions Comprehensive Reviews so we can have an annual report from Commissioner Lanter. August will be about a year since he started both those advisory groups and I think it would be great for us to have an update. So I move that we put into committee the Landlord Advisory Group and Tenant Advisory Group review by Commissioner Lanter. Is the motion a second? Any discussion on that matter? All those in? Councilman James Brown. Sorry, Chair. I'm just, and Councilmember Litch, I appreciate you making the motion. I just wonder if we can actually put an item in committee. In committee. Does it have to be the full council? That's my only question. I think we could probably create the item in committee. It probably is the proper place to do it at the work session. So maybe refer that there, but we'll go ahead and make sure that our staff has got that down and ready to go. But that's probably a good point of order. Agree. That being said, what we could do, since it's part of the Board's Commission is already there, and you're asking to pull that particular piece out. So how about we phrase your motion that way so we get our business done? And does a second or agree to that? The boards and commissions comprehensive review is already part of this committee, and I think she's just asking to separate this piece out as its own separate piece. That way we can handle that business hearing committee, or you can wait to work session, either way. I can wait to work session. That's fine. I'll withdraw my motion. Council Member Plowman. Thank you, Chair, I have several. The first one has to do with the consent agenda process, which has been completed. So I move to remove the study from the committee. So moved. Second. Sorry, I couldn't hear which item you're removing. Consent agenda. Consent agenda, okay. Item one there. So motion a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you, we'll remove that. You had some others, Councilmember? Yes, I do, Chair. I move to remove the study of conditional use permits and related zone text amendments to the rural service area from committee. Because after we took a real hard look at that, they were minimal anyway. So we decided to go ahead and take that one out, so moved. We have a motion and a second. That's item number ten for the committee's reference. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. And any others, Council Member? Yes, the final one I have is number 12. And I move to remove the review of the Rural Land Management Board recommendation process to the Planning Commission from committee. Is communication has been streamlined with Commissioner Horn overseeing preservation along with planning now. And what that basically means is we were looking at the step by step that the Rural Land Management Board went through on planning. And because of a new kind of look at it from planning Commissioner Horn, that's been taken care of. So moved. It's been a motion and a second to remove item 12. All those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? All right, thank you. Council Member, is that all? All right, no one else signed up. I believe we were deemed the agenda. We stand adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.