My family has owned a vacation rental in Seaside for 23 years and we have always truly cared about and supported Seaside in many ways, financially and otherwise. We aren’t sure where it started, but it is a total myth that vacation rental owners are all wealthy out-of-towners who are only interested in extracting dollars from your Seaside economy, leaving our rental properties in serious need of upkeep and maintenance, and leaving Seaside to solve its own problems.

There may be some VRD owners like that, but that is certainly not the majority of us.

The truth is that our 406 vacation rental properties in Seaside account for about 20% of the lodging tax revenue that comes to Seaside annually and collectively we are estimated to own $200 million worth of property in Seaside and thus we pay significant property taxes that also support your community even though most of us don’t live there.

Besides this significant support of your local economy we also provide many employment opportunities. We want to help Seaside to continue to be successful while also being the fun and very livable beach resort community it has been since it was founded. Your community has much to be proud of and vacation rental owners should be considered one of your great resources that could be even greater if only your mayor and City Council would partner with us as we desire.

If you are a vacation rental owner and would like to change the current adversarial culture that exists between the city of Seaside and vacation rentals, please consider joining our newly created Seaside Vacation Rental Owners Association that currently has more than 90 VRD owners participating. Our group’s current primary focus is to greatly reduce the recent outrageous 400% increase in our annual VRD permit fee and to push the city to consider hiring a compliance officer only half time or to consider other options to manage VRD compliance. To join our efforts simply send a request to pjoefoss@hotmail.com.

Joe Foss

Tacoma, Washington