Last night’s Arcata city council meeting was light on substance, though city councilmembers did contemplate buying software to catch operators of short-stay vacation rentals (such as Airbnb and VRBO) who don’t have a permit or aren’t paying tax. 

They also decided to let around 20 operators without a permit keep renting out rooms. 

Arcata’s short-stay vacation rental (SSVR) rules work like this: there are 100 total permits available for those who wish to operate an Airbnb or a VRBO rental, unless the owner lives on the property, it’s historical, or it’s only rented out less than 30 days a year. If the SSVR falls into any of those three categories, it needs a different SSVR permit. Arcata can give out an unlimited number of these exempt permits. 

About 2% of Arcata’s housing is an SSVR, and 99 of the non-exempt permits are being used. There are another 55 SSVRs with an exempt permit.

SSVR owners also need a business license and have to pay the Transient Occupancy Tax to the city. 

But not everyone plays by the rules, and there are an unknown number of SSVRs out there that don’t have either kind of permit and aren’t paying the TOT. David Loya, Arcata’s director of community development, told the council he gets sales calls occasionally trying to sell the city software that crawls rental websites, cross-references them with TOT and permit rolls, and spits out a list of illegal SSVRs. 

City councilmembers did not make a decision on buying software one way or the other, but all of them seemed warm to the idea. If they did decide to purchase it, the fee to get a permit would likely be bumped up a bit to fund it. 

Loya didn’t anticipate any pushback by current SSVR renters — anyone operating one illegally is cutting into the legal operators’ business.

Currently, the only way Arcata enforces these laws is if someone complains about an illegal SSVR. The city doesn’t have the staff and the time to hunt them down. 

The city council also decided to let 20 SSVRs, who had been paying the TOT but didn’t have a permit, keep operating. Loya wasn’t sure how that had happened, but he said he assumed they simply didn’t know they needed one and the city never told them. 

Councilmembers Kimberley White and Meredith Matthews said they were inclined to let them keep renting rooms out because of the lack of hotels outside of the Valley West area.

“I would like to see our money stay here in Arcata instead of sending to other outside cities’ jurisdictions,” White said. “I want them to spend money in Arcata. I want them to stay in Arcata. And however we can do that [is good].”