GAINESVILLE – “You guys are sitting on a ticking time bomb,” Bill Fricks of Buford told members of the Hall County Planning Commission Monday evening.
Fricks was commenting on efforts by county leaders to deal with what has become a benefit, or a burden, depending upon your perspective: short term rentals at private residences.
As of this writing websites VRBO.com and Airbnb.com list hundreds of rental opportunities on and around Lake Lanier, offering entire homes, or individual bedrooms in a home, to those looking for a short term place to live or vacation.
“You’ve got companies that are coming in and buying lake properties and running defacto hotels,” Fricks said. Fricks said he supports an individual’s right to use his property as he wishes but, “…there needs to be some governance over this.”
The reason for Frick’s comment was that Hall County Planning Director Srikanth Yamala was presenting to the commission the one-year report requested, and the recommended adjustments deemed necessary, to initial changes in the county’s short term rental policies made a year ago.
But the issues leading to the need for short term rental regulation are much more than 12-months in the making.
Possibly the origin of the problem goes all the way back to the impoundment of the 38,000-acre reservoir in the late 1950s and early 1960s and subsequent marketing effort to attract Atlanta residents to lakefront cottage developments as weekend getaways.
Much, needless to say, has changed in terms of living at Lake Lanier during the ensuing three score years.
Harold Trip resides on Lakeview Drive, a peninsula jutting out into the Shoal Creek area of the lower lake originally zoned VC, or Vacation Cottage, by Hall County. He told commissioners, “’Vacation Cottage’ (VC zoning designation) in most areas is virtually gone.”
“We live on a peninsula that probably has 75 houses; we still have three or four of the original dwellings that were built back in the 60s or 70s when it was a vacation, weekend type location,” Trip continued. “However, at this time, almost every house on our street is (rebuilt)…and virtually every house on the street is now worth $750,000 to $2-million.”
Trip said he and his neighbors who came to the meeting favored some sort of change in their current VC zoning classification to help regulate short term rentals. “Our streets are very narrow. There’s no place to park.”
Neighbors said driveways are often blocked and access by emergency vehicles would be hampered.
But parking isn’t the only concern when some of the lakefront homes near the Trip and Fricks families are rented to large groups. Septic systems are a major concern. Those systems are sized according to the number of bedrooms in a home with two people calculated to live in each bedroom.
So a five bedroom home, with a ten person septic system in place, is severely challenged when the home is rented to a large group for a weekend retreat or a reunion. “We shouldn’t wait for the system to fail and pollute our ground water to manage it then. The number of people allowed to live in the house becomes immaterial when you have 75 people there for a wedding,” Fricks explained.
Also of concern: personal safety - that according to many making comment at the Planning Commission meeting.
Jennifer Lane lives on Mountain Water Trail near Buford and says she struggles with not knowing who lives in the adjacent homes. “We are a subdivision of about 100 houses…and we do have a VRBO (Vacation Rental by Owner) house across the street from us that rents a room for $30 a night. They have different cars in the driveway all the time. You never know who is coming or going. It’s a big safety thing.”
Lane added, “The growth of short term rentals has pitted neighbor against neighbor.”
Gainesville resident Clyde Morris would like for the proposed changes recommended by Yamala and staff to be approved. “There are properties that are very well suited…as short term rentals. And what this change will allow you to do is to apply some judgment on behalf of an individual property owner…and by applying the common sense rules about how they operate them, and by making sure that they operate them in a way that they do not interfere with the neighbors, you have done the entire community a service.”
The vote by the four commissioners was split evenly at 2-2, reflecting, again, the polarizing effect of the subject. (Commissioners Stan Hunt and Chris Braswell voted to recommend Yamala’s adjustments to the county code; Commissioners Gina Pilcher and Frank Sosebee voted for denial of the change. By rule the request is given a “denial” status.)
The Hall County Commission will begin public hearings on the changes recommended by Yamala and his staff beginning February 28th, with a second public hearing and final vote scheduled for March 14th.
The disagreement on short term rental regulation doesn’t center on whether or not governance by the county is needed; the question seems to be what that governance includes. As the old saying goes, “The Devil is in the details”, and this issue may have no perfect answer.
