I wish we did write write this one, but we didn't.
With full permission from Joshua Montgomery I am reposting his letter - here:
Chairwoman Heather Kimball and Council Member Ashley Kierkiewicz have published the third draft of their proposal to heavily regulate homestays and farmstays here on Hawaii.
These regulations are separate from Bill 108 which passed in 2018 and addressed the issue of absentee owned vacation rentals. Since 2018 absentee owners have been tightly regulated and remain regulated today.
Their proposal is targeted at local families and farmers who rent a room or an ohana to visitors. They are targeting Kupuna who rely on visitor rentals as part of their retirement. They are targeting young families who can only afford a home if they rent a portion to visitors. They are targeting families who count on the money they make cleaning and maintaining vacation rentals.
Here on Hawaii our families already pay 42% of our income for housing. That is the highest in the nation. Many of us work multiple jobs and tolerate long commutes. The proposed regulations will add to that burden. We’re expected to hire architects, provide floor plans of our homes and tell the county where we sleep. We are required to dig up old permits, pay hefty registration fees, fork over non-conforming use payments and quietly submit to the whims of unelected review boards. And if we fail to navigate this maze successfully? We will be fined $10,000 per night and have our livelihood ripped away.
Some families won’t be able to do it. This will be the last straw. It will force them to leave the island. Some Kupuna will be bankrupted. Some will lose their homes. And those empty homes won’t be purchased by locals. Locals can’t afford them anymore. They will become second homes for the wealthy. This legislation will increase inequality and further reduce available housing stock.
Sometimes the government demands sacrifice for compelling reasons. I myself once signed a check payable to the United States Air Force for an amount up to and including my life. I was willing to sacrifice for a good reason - to protect fundamental principles like freedom, self governance and private property.
If Hawaii County is asking families to navigate a byzantine process, pay huge fees, comply with onerous regulations and risk tens of thousands of dollars in fines, then there needs to be a compelling reason.
There are no compelling reasons for the proposed regulations.
During public discussions about this bill Chairwoman Kimball brought up two reasons for introducing it. Complaints about visitors and a lack of affordable housing.
When the County published data to support these claims, we found them to be hogwash. According to the County’s data they received 65 complaints about hosted rentals last year. During that time families hosted more than 1,691,000 rental room nights. That is a complaint rate of 0.0038%. That isn't a sufficient reason for a widowed grandmother to lose her livelihood.
And on the affordable housing front, the idea that a family renting an ohana to visitors somehow reduces housing inventory is absurd. Families rent to visitors in order to pay their mortgage. They aren’t rich technology moguls renting oceanfront palaces. They are farmers renting a converted shed to agri-tourists.
So what is the real reason we don’t have affordable housing? Well, in 2022 the media ( not the elected officials who should have been watching the till ) discovered $11,000,000 in affordable credits were missing. So Hawaii County commissioned a study which found that in addition to rampant corruption, the “program has underserved communities around the island.” Among other findings, the auditor found that the County pre-awarded and over-awarded affordable housing credits, misinterpreted areas of its own code, failed to implement internal control systems, had no written administrative rules, no policies for vetting developers qualifications, no contract monitoring procedures and failed to maintain complete records.Farmstay operators are not causing the affordable housing crisis. Incompetence in local government is causing it.
Recently Chairwoman Kimball has been circulating a five year old paper from a partisan think tank as a justification for passing these regulations. The paper was written in 2018 - before Bill 108 regulated absentee owners. It makes a number of unsupported assumptions, prejudiced inferences, unwarranted comparisons and significant mistakes before coming to the conclusion that homestays are bad for housing. But even with this bias it still fails to tie hosted rentals ( where a family lives on the property ) to the affordable housing crisis. Instead it conflates hosted with the absentee and labels them all “bad” without taking into account the $400,000,000 that visitors spend with local homestay operators each year. Four hundred million dollars that goes to local families. That money is how families pay for housing. Without it they will struggle.
If I wanted to build a home I’d need an environmental study, sewage capacity study, traffic study, and archeological study. I’d be forced to endure multiple public hearings and navigate a kafkaesque permitting process. ( This, by the way, is the real reason we don’t have enough housing. ) We should expect no less from our elected officials.
Before the County sacrifices the livelihoods of 7,500 families on the altar of affordable housing we deserve to have an independent, academically rigorous, peer reviewed study of the effects of the 2018 bill. We deserve to know how homestays and farmstays impact local housing stock and we deserve a rigorous data driven analysis of the potential impact of the new rules. We also deserve to have measurable metrics so we can determine the performance of the regulation. The county regulated vacation rentals in 2018 to increase affordable housing stock. Did it work? Is housing less expensive today? How was success measured? How will the success of this effort be measured?
Jeopardizing the livelihoods of families who depend on this industry without a comprehensive study is like a doctor recommending life threatening surgery without obtaining blood tests and scans. There is a word for that: negligence.
With this in mind the Ohana Aina Association is offering to match up to $10,000 in Hawaii County Funds to commission an independent research study to be completed and peer reviewed before this legislation is fully drafted, revised and officially introduced.
Once we have the results of the study. Once we have facts. Once we have real numbers from an unbiased independent source. Then we can have a meaningful conversation on the future of homestays here on the Big Island.
Alternatively, we’d welcome a draft of the bill that looks more like the red-lined version our families provided to the County in December. This bill would provide regulation and accountability without a byzantine permitting, non-conforming use and zoning rules in the proposed draft. We don’t oppose regulation. We oppose heavy handed, ineffective, damaging and unmeasurable regulation.
We first made this offer to the County on January 26th. It’s been more than a month and we’ve heard nothing. If we haven’t heard back by March 31st we’ll assume that our elected officials are uninterested in studying the impact of new regulations before passing them and we’ll make sure the public knows that.
And to the public. If you clean, maintain, own, manage or host homestays for visitors. If your restaurant depends on visitors staying in local homestays. If you rely on visitor dollars to make ends meet. Please consider joining the Ohana Aina Association. We are here to fight legislation written by billion dollar colonial hotels. We’re here to advocate for competence in local government and, most of all, we are here to fight for you.
Join us. http://ohanaainaassociation.com
Sincerely,
Joshua Montgomery
President, Ohana Aina Association
joshua.montgomery@ohanaainaassociation.com
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