Political

Your home and neighborhood should be a refuge and sanctuary of quiet enjoyment. You have a reasonable expectation that a home next door or in your neighborhood does not become a hotel or hostel. 

For the last several years, I have heard many complaints and concerns from you about short-term rentals ruining your quality of life.  While we live in a free-enterprise economy, there are boundaries of reasonableness and decency. My mom always taught us, with every right of ours comes an equal responsibility to respect the rights of others.

I brought the idea of regulating short-term rentals to County planning staff several years ago and was all-but told to go pound sand. They tried to tell me that it's futile because the General Assembly was considering preemption legislation.  Well, that was a terrible attitude *and* the legislation was not passed.

Starting with a small group of residents on Paris Mountain, Council began to experience an organized effort to regulate short-term rentals for the benefit of existing residents.  That effort resulted in some modest additional regulations for the Environmentally Sensitive District-Paris Mountain (ESD-PM) zone. While I'm proud that we accomplished that, it didn't go nearly far enough in protecting against the abuses and nuisance caused daily from guests at short-term rentals. Further, the entire Greenville County should be protected from abusive and nuisance short-term guests.

With this pressure from the public, Council has created an ad hoc short-term rental committee.  That committee is meeting today at 4:00pm.  You can join it in-person at County Square or on your device with the link below.

While this is a great start, I have a concern and I need your help. I'm concerned that the mission could drift from regulation and enforcement to merely tax collection. By its very nature, government always wants more tax money above all else. While I agree that the County has been missing out on gazillions of dollars that these faux hotels and hostels should have been paying all along, I want to ensure that we get robust regulation and enforcement commensurate with that taxation. However, being a hospitality tax, Council could ultimately collect taxes on the short-term rental but claim its hands are tied against spending that money on things like more enforcement and public safety.  While that might be technically true, that doesn't prevent Council from shifting is general budget to account for that.

I encourage you to tune into the meeting today or attend in-person.  I will be watching on the County Livestream.

Also, feel free to email the committee members with the buttons below.

Your voice and support are critical to passing reasonable regulations against the abuses and nuisance of short-terms rentals.

(Pro tip: Look for pro-big corporation trade associations to begin to try to influence the outcome of this committee - also, always feel free to ask and verify who your elected official (or candidate) gets campaign contributions from).

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