One hundred years ago, Gearhart Park rejected its role as a short-term destination resort and declared itself the city of Gearhart, a true community of permanent and seasonal homeowners and long-term renters.

The short-term rental ordinance of 2016, passed by the Common Council of the city of Gearhart, reaffirmed our collective commitment to maintaining that community: while grandfathering existing vacation rentals (a great compromise on their legal status), it aims at bringing the number of short-term rentals down to an increasingly manageable number, thus lessening over time the negative impacts on Gearhart residents, and taking a big step toward alleviating the housing crisis for long-term renters and home-buyers.

Last week, that strategy for reducing STRs and increasing the availability of permanent housing received approval from the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals. For the first time in this state, and perhaps in the nation, a city’s stand against destruction of its community through profit-taking exploitation of its single-family dwellings was successfully defended at the state level.

While this was a great victory for the city of Gearhart, it wasn’t the final battle. Even though the city’s law, carefully crafted by the planning commission and city council with tons of public input over a three-year period, is already working with resounding success, a new threat looms on the horizon in the form of a petition to repeal and replace that law.

Sponsored by California political strategist David Townsend, and circulated by Gearhart residents Sarah Nebeker and Joy Sigler, the petition contains window dressing details (registration fee, telephone contacts, safety inspections, etc.) that make it appear similar to the city ordinance — though, unlike the city ordinance, with no penalties for violations.

Permitted occupation is vastly increased, and the septic requirements of the city ordinance are eliminated; vacation rentals will be free to pollute the community’s groundwater and make a municipal sewer inevitable.

Its core provision, however, undermines the main thing that the city’s ordinance achieves: the repeal and replace petition permits unlimited short-term rentals, regardless of sale of property, thus providing boundless opportunities for Vacasa, Airbnb, and other speculators already hungrily circling our community, eager to transform it back into the destination resort it had been before 1918.

But the petitioners need a required number of signatures in order to put this initiative on the ballot. If you’ve already signed it by mistake, you’re entitled to ask them to remove your name. If you haven’t signed, they’ll be knocking on your door, and when they do, they won’t show you the details; instead, they’ll ask for your signatures, whether you’re for it or against it, “just to make sure the people get to vote.”

At that point, ask yourselves, “Should the destruction of the Gearhart community as we know it become a ballot measure, just so the people get to vote on it?”

Bill Berg

Kent Smith

Gearhart