A new bill outlining a registration process for hosted transient vacation rentals, or TVRs will be introduced May 6 during Hawaii County Council committee meetings in Kailua-Kona.
In a public Zoom briefing held Thursday evening, council members Heather Kimball and Ashley Kierkiewicz said the measure is Bill 47. They said it is dialed back from last year’s Bill 121, a controversial 30-page piece of legislation that was shelved late in the year.
“As we were deliberating on Bill 121, the community asked for two things,” Kierkiewicz said during the briefing. “They said, ‘Let’s take a step back and pump the brakes. Let’s keep this really, really simple. Let’s just look at registering … the fact that we are operating as vacation rentals.’
“The other ask was, ‘Can you please conduct a financial impact analysis so that we can understand what this industry is doing for Hawaii Island’s economy?’ There are statewide data sets for transient accommodation rentals, but really nothing specific as to Hawaii Island because our market is so unique. We’ve heard from so many of you that you rely on your vacation rental to supplement your household income, to pay for your agriculture operations. And we also see that transient vacation rentals are something that visitors are gravitating towards, with more than 40% of visitors choosing a TVR when they visit Hawaii Island.”
Kimball described Bill 47 as “a straight-up registration bill.”
“The registration process will be managed by the Finance Department,” Kimball said.
“However, enforcement will take place through the Planning Department.”
The other thing Bill 47 will do, according to Kimball, is to require “platforms like Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, Kayak — all of those that … do list transient accommodations on their sites to register with the county and provide us with monthly numbers of units that are registered and the (tax map key locations) and transient accommodation registration number.”
The measure, if adopted, will assess hosted TVRs an initial registration fee of $250, with a fee of $500 for unhosted TVRs. There also will be annual renewal fees of $100 for hosted accommodations, and a $250 renewal fee for unhosted TVRs.
There also will be fines of up to $10,000 for TVR owners or operators who fail to register with the county.
Kimball noted that the Planning Department already has a registration process for unhosted TVRs, which are the only transient accommodation rentals currently required to be registered.
“At this time, the Planning Department has about 4,800 vacation rentals, STVRs, registered under their program,” Kimball said. “… Some preliminary data from vendors that do provide analysis of the hosting platforms like Airbnb and VRBO indicate that we have two times to three times as many actual short-term vacation rentals in operation. A large number of those are probably perfectly legal hosted short-term vacation rentals, and we’re not looking to shut those down.
“But we are trying to understand the full nature of the landscape of short-term vacation rentals in the county.”
Unhosted TVRs that are in compliance with the current registration requirement adopted in 2018 will not have to re-register or pay the registration fee, but will have to pay the yearly renewal fee.
Kierkiewicz also touched upon Resolution 556-24, which directs the county Research and Development Department to conduct a financial impact study, as well as a pair of surveys — one for TVR operators and another for residents who don’t own or host visitor accommodations.
Both surveys can be found at hawaiicountytar.com.
County R&D has contracted Hunden Partners, a Chicago consultant in destination real estate, to conduct the financial impact study.
“They are anticipated to be providing us with a preliminary analysis of data in May, with a completed analysis in June,” Kierkiewicz said. “And at that point, council member Kimball and I, with R&D, will most likely host a presentation, either in this format or to the council, so that we can all review the findings together.”
Between study and survey, according to Kierkiewicz, “we’ll have a more accurate sense of where vacation rentals are on Hawaii Island.”
“We can identify clusters and really consider do we want to create visitor destination areas, rather than creating more resort nodes? Because I don’t think anybody is asking for building more hotels,” she said.
Public input and feedback during Thursday’s Zoom briefing was limited to chat box entries.
There was, however, some resistance to the plan, much of it looking like the testimony against last year’s Bill 121.
A couple of chat boxer commenters, however, noted that their bookings are down because there are no more direct flights from Japan to the Big Island, as well as predictions that the economic policies of the Trump administration will have an adverse effect on Hawaii tourism numbers.
Kierkiewicz replied in the chat box that Hunden Partners is being asked to take current economic realities into account in its study.
“I think it’s important for us to get a really accurate picture of who is operating where,” Kierkiewicz said. “There’s a heavy amount of skepticism in the questions … but this is honestly an attempt to work with community from the ground up. Folks asked for a registration process, to keep things very simple. We are starting with that. We are also doing the fiscal impact analysis that the community wanted.
“We know that Hawaii Island is a very unique market in that many of the hosted rentals are part of farm operations. We get that. We want to make sure that all of this is taken into consideration so negative impacts are not made with future policy-making.
“We are looking to work with you in partnership with you to guide any kind of legislation.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
