There are solutions to the short term lodging challenges
Thanks to the City staff, appointed and elected Laguna Beach officials, and all those involved for all the time and effort spent developing for Laguna a fair, balanced, and equitable approach to the issue of short term lodging.
After all that effort, is must be frustrating that late in the day at its hearing last Thursday, after hours of detailed deliberations over a few parking spaces in Malibu and old pipes at Playa Vista, the Coastal Commission announced that they only had the room until 7:00PM and that the hearing on Laguna’s adopted ordinance would be constrained by that time limit.
The result was short shrift given to all sides in a hurry-up hearing of Laguna’s request for certification of an amendment to its Local Coastal Plan incorporating the short-term lodging ordinance the City has adopted unanimously after many months of and thousands of hours of citizen and City debate. (And not that many issues in Laguna result in unanimous opinions.) Whether a more extensive hearing of an issue with widespread consequences for many communities throughout California would have led to a better decision is debatable, but what is not debatable is the appropriateness, or actually lack thereof, of the manner in which the hearing was held.
While most Californians understand the mission of the Coastal Act is to assure there are no gates or fences impeding physical coastal access, the current Coastal Commission seems to be embarking on its own social engineering mission, 1) aggressively broadening its scope by stretching definitions and 2) imposing unfunded mandates on local communities.
Its current efforts to reinterpret the word “access” as more than physical access to include a requirement that local communities provide unlimited affordable vacation accommodations to anyone who wants a day at any specific beach of the visitor’s choosing at any time of their choosing at a price the visitor can afford reflects both these issues. The stretch of the definition is obvious.
An unfunded mandate is a requirement by one level of government that another level of government perform certain actions with no funds provided to do so. In this case, the state requires cities to do something costly and requires the city to absorb the cost. That the Coastal Commission is doing this to local communities is less obvious, but no less consequential.
While visitors bring additional revenue to a community, visitors also bring additional cost. The problem is, in Laguna’s case, the additional cost far exceeds the additional revenue. Because Laguna graciously hosts so many visitors annually, compared to other cities in California with our population, the cost to run the government of the City of Laguna Beach is roughly three times the cost to run cities of similar size with little or no visitor impact. The shortage is made up by the residents with funds paid by local residents that should be used for local resident needs that are instead diverted to cover the extra costs due to visitors.
There are solutions - -two of which are: The State of California Coastal Commission can rein back in its overreach and work for reasonable balance between visitors and residents. And the State of California can provide the funds to the local communities that will cover the additional costs resulting from the state’s requirements. By the way, that number – the shortage -- is about $25,000,000 per year or something like $2,000 per year per Laguna household.
John Thomas
Laguna Beach