Palm Coast Enacts Vacation Rental Regulations as 10-Guest Limit Survives, But Milestone May Be Sort-Termed

Ending a half-year slog, the Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday approved the city’s first-ever short-term vacation rental regulations, with registration and inspection fees and penalties for violators. There are well over 200 such rentals in the city.

The 10-guest cap per rental survived after a last-ditch attempt by two council members to raise it, but children exempt from counting against the cap may now be up to 3 years old. The previous exemption applied for children up to 1 year old.




Palm Coast’s milestone may be short-lived should the Florida Legislature do what it’s done every year since 2014, coming closer to success every time: attempt to prohibit most local regulations of the fast-growing industry even as it continues to alter the character of residential neighborhoods. A bill scrapping local regulations passed both chambers of the Legislature last year but was vetoed by the governor.

That bill, however, carved out an exemption for Flagler County regulations, thanks to Paul Renner, who was the county’s representative at the time, and the Speaker of the House. Renner was term-limited, and his replacement, Sam Greco, has no such pull.

The Palm Coast ordinance on short-term rentals, or STRs, as council members refer to them, was approved unanimously on second reading, which means it is now in effect. Notably, it was approved with the votes of three council members–Mayor Mike Norris, Council members Ray Stevens, Ty Miller, and to some extent Charles Gambaro–who had not worked on it as it emerged out of the administration’s scriptorium last summer. But they had voted on it on first reading last month.

The approval might have been delayed yet again after Gambaro floated an amendment to exempt owner-occupied short-term rentals from the 10-person guest limit. The property would have to be homesteaded for that exemption to apply. “All the other aspects of the enforcement of the ordinance from a public safety perspective remain in effect,” he proposed.




Council member Ray Stevens supported the owner-occupied exemption. It “boggled my mind,” he said, that guest occupancy would be limited in any short-term rental. He favored a two-person-per room limit, but if a house has six rooms, it should be allowed to host 12 people. Otherwise, the cap limits the operators’ ability to “make a buck,” as he put it, as members of the audience snorted.

Norris did not see it that way. “The whole issue is the number of people and about their bottom line, how much money they make,” Norris said, referring to what he described as just three people who have had an issue with the proposed ordinance, and who have lobbied him and other members of the council hard to lift the limit on occupancy.

“As I told them in our meeting, your income is not relevant. In this argument, the quality of life in our neighborhoods are relevant,” Norris said. “If the issue is you want to own a true bed and breakfast, whatever, a hotel, buy a hotel. But you are living in a residential neighborhood.” A resident had just told him that a rental had 18 people under one roof, “and that that is not a reasonable amount, and personally, I thought we came to a reasonable compromise during the last meeting as far as the number of people.”

Council member Theresa Pontieri, who pushed for then championed the ordinance from its inception, was just as strongly opposed to relaxing the occupancy limit, but also worried that if the Gambaro proposal was adopted, homeowners would attempt to “skirt that rule” and appear to be homesteaded on paper without being so in the actual house. Several residents who addressed the council raised that issue: who will police the owners in that regard, they asked, though the county property appraiser has strict rules and verifications of homesteaded properties. One of the angrier residents put it bluntly: “No one’s going to force no code around here,” he said.




Roger Cressey of the Canal Community Coalition, the neighborhood group established last year to lobby for vacation-rental regulations–and that can legitimately take credit for the ordinance–said the 10-person cap should be a closed matter. “That limit of 10, we think, is sacrosanct,” he said, citing 40 properties that have had complaints lodged against them in the C-Section alone in the last six months over “noise to lights to abuse from them to people parking on their gardens, to trespassing and fishing,” he said. Three or four members of the coalition have put their houses up for sale “so that they could get out of dodge, away from the STRS,” he said, while Cressy’s own family hid away from the neighborhood on new Year’s to get away from the noise of the Airbnb across the street.

“This is this is our lives. It’s our livelihood. It’s our property. And when someone starts to talk about somebody else making money out of a residential property in a residential area, it starts to get my higher up,” Cressy said, pressing for the 10-person cap.

Joel Davisson, the owner, with his wife, of a 4,000-square-foot, six-bedroom house on Pine Grove Drive, said he’s been an Airbnb for nine years without complaints. The Davissons have lobbied hard against the 10-person cap (what one resident described to the council as “business owners crying the blues”). Davisson said: “People will break rules, but, you know, not us, our little bubble,” he said.

The amendment exasperated some of the residents who’d watched the council craft the ordinance over months. “We visited and revisited this thing since July, and there’s always an 11th-hour addendum or recommendation. And I really felt that we should have been past this by now,” a C-Section resident said.




“I understand that we do have good Airbnb operators that abide by the rules,” Miller, the council member, said. “But there has to be a line somewhere that’s drawn, and wherever that line is drawn, someone will have a problem with that. I’m afraid of the slippery slope of adding more, and then it becomes a problem later that doesn’t address the problems that we’re trying to get fixed right now.”

Gambaro’s amendment failed 3-2, with Norris, Pontieri and Miller voting against it. Then it was Norris’s turn to float his amendment, raising the age exemption within the guest cap to 3. That passed unanimously (Gambaro held no grudge over losing his amendment.)

The council also approved fees in a separate vote. The city estimates its code enforcement costs will be around $120,000. The council last year authorized adding a code enforcement officer to police short-term rentals, though the city won’t assign a single officer to the task. It will be distributed among existing officers as part of their other duties. A short-term rental registration will cost $275 annually, plus a $75 annual inspection fee. If the rental is transferred to a new owner, the same fee will re-apply at that point. The fees are expected to generate $123,000. The fees will be raised to match inflation annually.

Code violators will first be issued a warning. If problems persist, the matter will be referred to the city’s Code Enforcement Board. Fines may be levied. Short-term rental licenses may be revoked, liens imposed, and civil or criminal penalties sought.




The city does not have a limit on allowable short-term rentals. A resident cautioned the city about that, noting the explosive number of rentals in some communities, “so we’re not overwhelmed.” Norris considered it “a very good consideration,” though the proposal is pre-empted by state law, as Pontieri noted. The law forbids such limits.

The ordinance has passed. But it may be written in pencil more than stone, not just because the Legislature’s likely next attempt at invalidating local ordinances looms. “There are things on both sides that people would still like to see worked on. So I think I’m open to that,” Pontieri said.

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