Zoning amendment on short-term lodging would require annual reporting to city

LACONIA — Members of the city’s planning board on Tuesday will hold a public hearing regarding changes to the zoning ordinance relative to short-term lodging and residential accessory uses.

The proposed amendment is meant to address conflicting or confusing language within the short-term lodging regulations. It’s not meant to restrict or expand that use in any specific district, according to a city staff report, but to provide a clearer reading of the ordinance and facilitate understanding of where use is permitted, and the process to obtain a permit. 

“I will schedule a public hearing for next month at planning board, and then planning board would vote on it and then we would move that forward to city council,” Planning Director Rob Mora said during the March 4 meeting of the planning board.

According to the city’s zoning ordinance, the planning board must review, approve and hold a public hearing on any amendment to the zoning ordinance. 

“There was just a lot of confusion in how the last ordinance for short-term lodging read,” Mora said. “Really making sure that it’s very clear, so when it goes to zoning board, zoning board understands fully what they’re approving and why they’re approving a specific short-term lodging permit.”

Per the proposed language, short-term lodging is the commercial use or the making available for commercial use of a residential dwelling unit for: dwelling, lodging or sleeping purposes wherein any individual guest rents or occupies the entire dwelling unit for a period of less than 15 consecutive calendar days. That doesn’t include the rental or occupancy of a residential accessory structure, accessory dwelling unit, tent, trailer or mobile unit.

In the case of one parcel containing multiple dwelling units, each one constitutes a separate short-term residential rental use. A permit for use of a dwelling unit for short-term lodging must be obtained from the planning department.

According to the proposed language, this use would be permitted by right in the commercial resort and shorefront residential districts. It would be permitted by special exception in the residential rural; residential rural corridor; residential single-family; residential general; residential apartment; urban commercial; and commercial districts. It would further be prohibited in the industrial, industrial park and airport industrial districts.

The use would also be prohibited in accessory dwelling units, single-family homes with an ADU, apartment buildings, boarding houses and assisted living facilities. 

Most notably, the proposal introduces an audit process whereby those participating would be required to submit an annual report to the planning department by Feb. 1, detailing their total number of bookings and listings, and the total number of days a given property is rented. 

“We added in an audit process on there where they needed to submit to us annually the number of short-term rentals that they had,” Mora said at last month’s meeting.

The entirety of the proposed language is available at laconianh.gov.

There are currently 93 approved short-term rentals in the City of Laconia, according to city data, mostly concentrated at the Weirs, but also dispersed in other areas, such as downtown and Lake Opechee, and on either side of Paugus Bay.

The largest of those can accommodate 18 people with seven parking spaces and is located downtown. The size and scope of rentals varies widely; some are far smaller. There are also clusters, such as at the Weirs, where multiple short-term rentals are approved, including one with 22 individual units.

“We’ve also seen in the city a multi-family structure or a three-unit multi-family structure, the owner lives there and they are short-term lodging out the other two units,” Mora said. “Those units are now lost to those people who are desperately in need of them, which was the whole purpose we created the short-term lodging ordinance, to preserve the housing stock in the heart of Laconia where the working people live. That was our intent with that.”

The list is likely not exhaustive — there’s no real way for city staff to track the number of properties offered as short-term rentals with complete accuracy. The list of 93 only represents those where property owners have followed the rules and gone through the appropriate channels to register them, but it’s possible that unapproved properties may turn up on websites including Airbnb, Vrbo or Craigslist.

“That was one of the things that we really wanted to highlight was, we’re requiring them to submit an audit to us annually,” Mora said. “We limit them to how many days they can do it but we have no way of knowing how many days that they’re actually renting it out. You might have somebody in an RS district that’s renting it out 365 days a year, and claiming that they live there. But without having proof, it’s very hard to enforce.”