Curry County commissioners on Wednesday issued a 180-day moratorium on vacation rentals.

The Board’s unanimous decision came at the recommendation of their county counsel and director of operations, Ted Fitzgerald, who based his advice on complaints from residents about the process.

The moratorium went into effect Wednesday.

“We want to look at the way our ordinance potentially conflicts with existing land-use ordinances,” Fitzgerald told commissioners. “Right now it’s difficult to administer especially with the amount of funding that’s available to us so we want to basically try to perhaps look at making this more akin to regulation of a hotel.”

Starting in 2022, The Curry County Board of Commissioners required those wishing to operate a vacation rental in the unincorporated areas of the county to have a land-use permit. Short-term rentals are also required to pay transient lodging taxes to the county.

Short-term rentals are allowed on land that's zoned as residential and light commercial. This is primarily within the urban-growth boundaries near Brookings, Gold Beach and Port Orford, according to Commissioner Jay Trost.

Short-term rentals are not permitted on land zoned for forestry or grazing, according to Fitzgerald. Most vacantion rentals are in the Harbor and Nesika Beach areas as well as outside Port Orford, he said.

Trost said one of the issues he’d like to look into is how many short-term rentals fall under the heading of “out-of-county-owned” business licenses.

“You hate to tell somebody they can’t do something with their land,” he said, “but we also need to be able to put up some guardrails that help preserve the locally-owned as opposed to the out-of-county-owned investment properties.”

Trost’s colleague Brad Alcorn said he faced the same issue when he was on the Brookings City Council.

“The key word, I think, is balance,” he said.

SHARE →