Judge rejects South Lake Tahoe’s ban on short-term rentals as unconstitutional
South Lake Tahoe’s Measure T is unconstitutional, an El Dorado County judge ruled Thursday rejecting the controversial short-term rental measure initiative in its entirety.
South Lake Tahoe voters narrowly approved the ballot initiative in 2018 that barred short-term rentals in the city’s neighborhoods with a cutout that allowed permanent residents who lived in the city more than six months a year to rent their properties for up to 30 days.
Those residents received “Qualified Vacation Home Rental” permits to open up their homes for rent.
On Thursday, El Dorado Superior Court Judge Gary Slossberg ruled the permits’ permanent resident exception, a tentpole of the ballot measure, could not stand and threw out the initiative, South Lake Tahoe officials said in a news release Thursday announcing the decision.
“The court found that while the permanent resident exception serves the legitimate local purpose of preventing nuisances, this purpose could be adequately served by reasonable nondiscriminatory alternatives,” South Lake Tahoe officials said in their statement.
The measure’s backers in 2018 contended the tourist town’s streets and neighborhoods were being taken over by vacationing short-timers who clogged roads, took up parking spaces and partied into the wee hours.
The measure imposed immediate caps on the number of people allowed to stay in many of South Lake Tahoe’s rental properties — 2 to a room for 12 dwellers per household — with fines of up to $1,000 for violators. After three years, the measure would have banned short-term rentals in neighborhoods outside the city’s downtown, about 1,300 properties, costing the city about $4 million a year in tax revenue.
But the opponents, South Lake Property Owners Group, sued to block the measure, arguing it unconstitutionally infringed on what homeowners could do with the properties. An El Dorado Superior Court judge temporarily blocked the measure that December and the city went along with the ruling while saying it supported its main provisions limiting who could rent out properties and where.
That was the argument South Lake Tahoe took to a court trial last November. Even if Measure T’s permanent resident exception was ruled unconstitutional, the city argued, the court should allow the city to proceed with the remainder of the measure including its ban on short-term rentals in its residential neighborhoods.
But the El Dorado court’s Slossberg rejected the city’s argument, saying the ballot’s language showed that the permanent resident exception was such a linchpin of Measure T that the two could not be severed.
The court has not yet filed the judgment. Once it does, South Lake Tahoe City Council has 60 days to decide whether to file an appeal.
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