The Boerne Planning and Zoning Commission is looking to establish a subcommittee to develop criteria that will guide planners in approving or denying special-use permits for bed-and-breakfasts around town. The concept came up after handfuls of requests were brought before the planners during each meeting since the adoption of the new Unified Development Code last year.
Boerne Planning and Community Development Director Laura Haning reminded the planners last week that the new UDC updated regulations, requiring special-use permits for any short-term rental outside of the downtown overlay district and the River Road overlay district. Now, Haning said the short-term rental requests are treated much like zoning requests, as the city hosts BOND meetings with nearby residents before bringing the request to the planners.
One special-use permit request brought to the planners last week reignited an existing desire among the planners to develop the subcommittee. A homeowner on Wanda Street bought the home with the intention of renting it out just before the implementation of the new UDC which required the owner to obtain a special-use permit. Haning said as city staff scan short term rental sites – like Airbnb – for homes not registered with the city, they are finding several property owners who just weren’t aware they needed to seek a special use permit.
Planner Joe Anzollitto said he still felt the same concerns he had at the planners’ last meeting about handling these special-use permits without any uniform requirements or criteria in place for how they would handle them moving forward. While he said other cities have overlay districts or other measures in place to guide city officials on whether to approve or deny a short-term rental use, he said the current measures in Boerne are relatively broad once a permit request comes in outside of the two overlay districts that automatically allow the use.
Planning Chair Tim Bannwolf furthered the idea that having a committee develop criteria to approve or deny short-term rental permits would be beneficial, saying the city doesn’t want to “become another Fredericksburg in terms of short-term rentals.”
Planner Bob Cates said the planners talked about considering density of shortterm rentals in areas of Boerne without overlay districts and looked to city staff to understand whether there are dense areas of such rental properties. Haning said city staff put together a map of registered and unregistered short-term rentals to identify areas of high density, but the map was unavailable during the time of the meeting.
The planners went back and forth with motions, with half the planners wanting to approve the Wanda Street short-term usage and the other two thinking approval should be tabled until further criteria could be developed on how the planners should move forward. Cates took issue with essentially shutting down the property owner’s business, saying they purchased the property as a rental investment, and he felt it was unfair to take someone’s business from him or her while the planners worked out a way to handle the usage requests uniformly.
In the end, Cates was somewhat strongarmed into approving a motion to table the usage request, as three of the planners were not present at the meeting, so his motion to approve was not going to receive the votes to pass. Had he not withdrawn his motion to approve the request, the motion would have died rather than being tabled.
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