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In case you missed it, the Town of Mammoth Lakes instituted a short term rental (STR) moratorium on October 18, 2023, which essentially restricted the granting of new transient occupancy tax (TOT) certificates to potential rental operators.

Then, an advisory committee was convened and an economic impact study completed to direct the Town Council toward those ordinances most beneficial in regulating the short term rental market in Mammoth. 

On April 22nd, the moratorium was lifted. That same day, the recommended revisions to the former transient rental operative procedures, drawn up during the 187 days the moratorium was in place, went into effect.

Chief among these was the instatement of a Certified Properties program—essentially, a replacement program for not only the procedures regarding short term renting, but how TOT and the tourism business improvement district (TBID) is collected. Previously, a certificate might be held by the owner of a rental, or his/her property manager that remitted the certificate on the owner’s behalf. Moving forward, owners will be the sole proprietors of their Certified Property authorization. The idea is to increase availability and direct accountability between property owners and their rental units—to “allow the Town improved access to owners” and “to keep them abreast of activity in their unit.”

Part of that access requires applicants for the Certified Properties program to submit a local 24-hour emergency contact for their rental unit. That contact must be a “certified [business] with the Town of Mammoth Lakes.” Should a property owner choose to work with a certified property management service, “that business can qualify as the BTC [Business Tax Certificate] which remits TOT/TBID, facilitates cleaning services, and provides the service of a local 24-contact.”

But for local rental operator Bonnie Holman, the new changes are a bridge—or a few bridges—spanned too far.

Holman, who has lived in town full-time since 2018 and rents out her primary residence during Christmas and peak summer tourism, wrote into The Sheet with her frustrations regarding the procedures, as implemented on April 22.

“Demanding that hundreds of individual operators have a 24-hour call line is a level of service that the Town does not meet in any of its own operations,” said Holman, in an email correspondence. “Not even the police department answers calls after business hours … When someone wants to call in a nuisance or something minor, they have to use 9-1-1 because there is no one employed at the police department to answer after hours … What is a property management person going to do at 11 p.m. with a noise law violation? Ask kindly for it to stop?”

Holman also expressed concern with the interactive STR map recommended for adoption—a tool that Town Manager, Rob Patterson, has said is deployed in other peer municipalities and may work to “smooth our and calm down how people are reacting to rentals in their area.”

But Holman fears the access scammers and Internet bots will have to that contact information, displayed publicly. 

“Instead of requiring hundreds of telephone numbers to [be] displayed on a map, suggests Holman, how about we take the portion of the TOT fund allocated to this additional bureaucratic mess, and fund the police instead?”

But for Town Finance Department staffer Danny Earls, while the dissent for these operating requirements may be new, the code is anything but. 

According to Earls, the requirement for a 24-hour emergency contact has been written into the Town’s municipal code since 2011. 

“So it’s not like we just created this,” said Earls. “This is not something we just came up with. It’s a different way of enforcing it.”

Then, after October of 2015, the Town began requiring signatures from emergency contacts themselves, as people were being enrolled in the former program, unbeknownst to them, and receiving calls at early hours. 

“So where the STR committee started going was down the road of, ‘we need to identify and verify where these local, 24-hour emergency contacts live,” said Earls. “The alternative to knocking on doors was that a 24-hour emergency contact be a certified business in town.”

But any old business isn’t a certified business. 

Schedule A businesses—retail, or restaurants—aren’t going to qualify. According to Earls, you have to apply as a service business (Schedule B) or a TOT remitter—essentially, a property management company—to be eligible. 

“Now, if you’re a snow removal operator, which also classifies as Schedule B, and you want to update your business model to include being a 24-hour emergency contact … great. Come in. There’s no charge. Fill out the paperwork to update your business model.”

And, it bears clarifying, if you are the proprietor of a rental unit and your home address is within 60 miles of Mammoth Lakes, you may list yourself as the required contact. Should property owners wish to ‘insulate’ their identities from public display via the interactive rental map, a DBA (“Doing Business As”) or the opening of an LLC (“Limited Liability Company”) is encouraged. 

As for what’s expected from a rental’s point-person, Earls says the system is designed for use by occupants in the case of a burst pipe, an animal entry, or an unclean/unsafe unit. 

“I know we focus on noise a lot, but we actually have an incredibly low number of noise complaints in this community,” said Earls. “The majority of our rentals are in multi-unit complexes … [renters] understand there will be noise.”

But regarding noise complaints, says Earls, the Town encourages people to take advantage of the station’s 24-hour emergency coverage by calling the operator, and getting an officer dispatched to the unit.

“Call the police,” advised Earls, in reference to how emergency contacts should respond to complaints. “That’s absolutely what they should be doing.”

For Earls, a representative of the Town, that’s what these regulations come down to—representing the town.

“$227 million flowed through the lodging community last fiscal year. We’re not some small-time bus stop destination anymore,” said Earls. 

And that enhanced exposure to tourism, from the Town’s perspective, calls for enhancing the standard of accountability on the owner’s side of the rental game—the same standard you would expect from any paid service. 

“I would avoid comparing a rental service to a police department or any Town operation,” said Amanda Rice, Town Council member and member of the former STR Advisory Committee. “It’s more like a hotel. And hotels, typically, have 24-hour help available at their front desks.”

“People don’t understand that they’re a business. A business providing services for monetary compensation,” said Earls. “You’re representing the community, and the Town. You have to act accordingly.”

But, for Holman, refining rental procedures will only go so far in addressing the heart of the issue. 

“I had thought the [advisory] committee was formed with a different focus,” says Holman. “You know, figuring out how rentals in town impacted access to housing for locals … But the impetus for forming the committee seemed to be different from the output of the committee.

If the problem is local housing, come on, let’s work on it. I don’t see how a map with 24-hour contact numbers does anything to solve that.”