Consternation continues over vacation rentals

| The New Mexican

7/3/2008 - 7/3/08

A month or so into the first Santa Fe Summer under the city's short-term rental ordinance, our city has been más o menos peaceful; no noisy raids by the Propriety Police, who landed on Goler Fine Shoes last July like a big bird for the Palace Avenue store's violation of city law against saying it was having a sale.

But this time, City Hall has adversaries it might not even know; homeowners who perhaps have been renting out their homes, or rooms in them, without reporting their enterprises. And now that there's a thousand-dollar permit fee, along with legal hoops through which to jump, maybe many have gone deeply underground: What's this we hear about late-night contact between summer visitors and local homeowners at parking lots — where luggage is transferred to cars with in-state plates? And, more slyly, out-of-state cars being fitted with landlords' New Mexico tags for the duration?

By now, most locals are aware of the clandestine finishing schools at which tourists shed their Texas accents, trade their Hawaiian-nightmare garb for Santa Fe Style, and the men don those special ponytail wigs, hairpinned or elastic-banded to their hair. This has generated a whole new cottage industry in addition to the cottages being rented for fat fees.

Or are we just imagining such things?

It's all enough to keep the more nannyesque of our city councilors awake at night, conjuring up ways to apply the long arm of the law to those who'd scoff at it. And worse still is the "resort" loophole left in the law: Designed to appease the people of Quail Run, it allows those tony quarters, 250 or more of them behind a gate in the southeast foothills, to rent away without regard to the ordinance's limit of 350 vacation-rental units.

That's terrible, wail those councilors and the more zealous city staffers, joined by a chorus of citizens concerned that touristic presence in residential areas might unravel the fabric of our traditional neighborhoods, or something like that.

Well, their concerns were answered early this year with the passage of the short-term rental law — or were they? There's certain to be a post-mortem sometime in the fall.

As for Quail Run, it's hardly what the council had in mind when it finally passed the rental ordinance. The place is nicely self-contained and governed by homeowner-association rules. We're confident that order will be maintained.

B-b-but what about other condominium-style compounds? What if people at that non-gated place across St. Michaels Drive from the hospital take it in their heads to rent units out for the summer? The hand-wringing at City Hall, we can see, soon might accelerate, even though the presence of summer visitors could be dealt with effectively by the homeowners' board.

For the moment, it appears that Quail Run's ducking of the city's heavy hand is owing to its ownership of a golf course of sorts. Merely having tennis courts and maybe a swimming pool won't get other condominiums off the hook. But will it keep owners of individual units from sneaking in Minnesotans here for the opera season, perhaps by having them put on Groucho Marx noseglasses, and is this any time to discourage tourists?

There's lots of summer left for testing this new law ...