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Honolulu City Council members pledged to introduce legislation that would confront Honolulu’s lack of enforcement of a law banning short-term vacation rentals. It comes after a Civil Beat investigation found the Department of Planning and Permitting issued violation notices to only 18 property owners throughout 2010, while hundreds or thousands more are believed to be breaking the law.

The department is now asking the City Council to pass a bill that would provide better tools for enforcement. Since 1989, Honolulu has banned homeowners from renting their properties for fewer than 30 days at a time unless they obtained a special permit — called a nonconforming use certificate, or NUC — more than 20 years ago.

No new permits have been issued since that time, and lapsed permits are ineligible for renewal. Attempts to pass laws that would allow more permits have failed. Honolulu law classifies B&Bs as vacation rentals where the property owner stays on-site with tenants, and transient vacation units or TVUs as vacation rentals where the property owner is off-site.

The bill the Department of Planning and Permitting wants to bring back is Bill 8, which failed in 2009, and would have forced renters to show proof of their special certificate in any rental advertisements.

“The number of B&B and TVU violations in startlingly low,” City Council member Stanley Chang told Civil Beat. “Especially compared to some of the other statistics, for instance sidewalk violations, it really illustrates we need better enforcement mechanisms.”

Chang said he spoke with Department of Planning and Permitting Director David Tanoue about the possibility of bringing back Bill 8.

“The feedback we’ve gotten from the Department of Planning and Permitting is Bill 8 makes it a very easy to implement mechanism of enforcement,” Chang said. “They can just have a person go online and make sure the numbers match up. I’ve always maintained that enforcement needs to come first, before we talk about any other aspect of the issue. So we’re looking very strongly at reintroducing that bill.”

It’s a move Managing Director Doug Chin said the mayor supports.

“Mayor Carlisle supports the efforts of the Department of Planning and Permitting to improve its enforcement capabilities, including legislation,” Chin wrote in an e-mail.

The short-term rental issue has long been controversial on Oahu, and not everyone on the council agrees with Chang’s approach. City Council member Ikaika Anderson — who supported¹ a bill introduced in 2008 that would have allowed more people to get short-term rental permits and made enforcement stricter — said the 2010 enforcement numbers show his measure should have passed.

“Given that information, it’s evident that the City Council should have passed (my bill) in December of 2009,” Anderson told Civil Beat. “If we had, I’m nearly certain if we had that we would have issued more citations, and I’d also bet that the city would have made good on enforcing the citations. We would have required all B&B permittees to pay a fee that would have either been $500 or $1,000 per permit, which would have netted the city anywhere form $600,000 to $1.2 million. We would have had monetary resources necessary to enforce whereas right now we don’t.”

Anderson said those extra monies were the key to enforcement, and directly links not having them to an abysmal number of violations filed against scofflaws.

“David Tanoue and I made it clear that under the current provisions, the city lacks the resources to enforce the unenforceable law that we have right now,” Anderson said. “What this shows is that David and I were both right.”

Despite frustration about missed opportunities, Anderson said he is not ready to resurrect the 2008 bill three years ago until he knows other City Council members would back him up. That bill — known as Bill 7 — failed by just two votes in a narrow City Council decision.

“I would need to know that there are a number of Council members who are interested in hearing the issue,” Anderson said. “I would not want to have the public take off from work, come down to City Hall, pay the parking meter, find a sitter, only to have the council end up in a deadlock like we were before. I don’t want to waste tax dollars.”

While some see the focus on compliance as an obvious next step, City Council member Tom Berg said the city is relying on the wrong people to carry out enforcement.

“The scope of the Department of Planning and Permitting’s jurisdiction shouldn’t be in that realm,” Berg told Civil Beat. “The DPP has no staff, and the staff they do have doesn’t work past 5 o’clock. I am willing to introduce language so that we stop encumbering government entities that cannot handle bringing compliance. The DPP does not have the resources, and the City Council needs to stop punting. That is the bottom line.”

City Council member Breene Harimoto also says the council needs to do more than simply give the Planning and Permitting Department more resources.

“It’s clear the city is unable to do this strict enforcement, and I really do believe we need to readdress the issue and tighten up the laws to enable the city to enforce them,” Harimoto said. “But it appears the city had not been really enforcing the so-called ban for 20 years. I think it’s unfair to all of the sudden do strict enforcement on something that has been done for 20 years.”

Harimoto said he would like the City Council to address the law and possible changes to it after going through the Honolulu budget in March.

“We need to stop and revisit the issue before we just focus on making enforcement stricter,” Harimoto said. “When we do address it, all the facts will come out, and we’ll be in a better situation.”