Check out this story from the Big Island’s West Hawaii Today (free registration may be required), “Other counties’ vacation rental laws could prove Big Island boon,” which starts off with this theorem: “[t]he Big Island could soon experience a windfall ofvisitor dollars that would have otherwise flowed into Maui, Kauai andHonolulu.” In the article, the County of Hawaii’s Planning Director contrasts the Big Island’s treatment of short term (aka vacation) rentals with their treatment by the other three counties:
“We do enforce nonlicensed bed and breakfasts and rentals on agricultural land that are supposed to be farm dwellings,” said Hawaii County Planning Director Chris Yuen. “But we’re not engaged in any kind of crackdown on vacation rentals.”
There’s a reason the Big Island has escaped a controversy that could culminate next month with a federal lawsuit brought against Maui County by an association of renters: Hawaii County’s zoning code does not distinguish between long-term rentals and short-term vacation units, also known as transient vacation rentals.
“The other counties do,” Yuen said. “They define vacation rental periods as less than ‘X’ number of days.”
. . . .
But Yuen, who said any kind of new ordinance regarding vacation rentals is not on his to-do list, said there are also benefits to the transient vacation unit business. “The upside is it allows a wider range of people to make money off the visitor economy,” Yuen said. “There are a lot of other issues one can take on, and this one isn’t one of them.”
This reminds me of a common “big box store” dynamic on the mainland. When one town or city bars such stores, they often just relocate to a neighboring jurisdiction which welcomes them (along with their sales and property taxes) with open arms. That dynamic doesn’t really work in Hawaii with retail outlets, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go to another island to shop, but as the article suggests, maybe it works on vacation rentals, since the visitor chooses between destinations before the trip.