Rehoboth Beach mulls heads-on-beds cap for rentals

Rehoboth Beach commissioners are contemplating a new way to regulate the city's booming vacation home rental market – capping a rental's occupancy by number of bedrooms. That's a rule some resorts around the country have, but Rehoboth Beach does not.

Many residents, and some commissioners, said they're bothered by recent construction of large new homes that in some cases sleep 20 or more people at a time. The city's staff drafted a "vacation rental ordinance" for commissioners that would limit three-bedroom homes to 10 occupants, four-bedroom homes to 12 occupants, and so on.

The reasoning is that homes in residential neighborhoods are increasingly overstuffed with vacationers, leading to parking, trash and noise problems. That is much more likely to happen with rental properties than owner-occupied homes, Commissioner Bill Sargent said in a Monday workshop meeting.

"If it's owner-occupied, I don't worry about it," Sargent said. "There's nothing wrong with family reunions."

Mayor Sam Cooper sounded unimpressed with the idea.

"I think you're powerless to enforce it if you impose it," Cooper said, sarcastically envisioning police officers staking out a home's exits as they counted heads inside.

Apart from Patrick Gossett, few other commissioners sounded enthusiastic about the proposed occupancy limits. Other tweaks to the city's rental code – including a listing of tenants' responsibilities, requiring landlords to give the city contact numbers in case of property problems and periodic inspections of rental properties – may be debated and introduced at an Aug. 21 meeting.

Meanwhile, the commissioners backed away from an ordinance that would require four, five or more off-street parking spaces for some large houses. Yet commissioners may form a task force to come up with recommendations on managing the crushing demand for curbside parking on residential streets.

Several commissioners said they no longer considered a draft parking ordinance that made it as far as the public-hearing phase as a workable idea. That proposed law would have required homes with more than three bathrooms to match the additional toilets with additional parking spaces in driveways – above a two-space baseline for all homes. The requirement would apply to newly built or substantially remodeled properties.

The idea was hammered by criticism during a July 17 public hearing, and commissioners said they were persuaded not to pass the draft ordinance as it was written. But several of them said parking on residential streets – where parking is controlled by daily, weekly or seasonal permits instead of meters – is still being squeezed, in part by large homes where renters arrive in multiple vehicles.

"A six-bedroom house, or an eight-bedroom house, with two parking spaces, it's obscene in a way," Cooper said. "And it's only going to get worse."

Commissioner Gossett suggested asking a cross-section of Rehoboth residents and businesspeople to join a task force that would study parking problems and present possible solutions to the city.

The draft parking ordinance may be voted on at an Aug. 21 meeting, several commissioners said, so that it could be voted down.

"We've got to take action on it so there's finality," Cooper said. No votes could be taken at Monday's meeting because it was labeled a workshop in public notices.

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com.