The Boone County Fiscal Court listened to suggestions Tuesday about whether New Graves Road should be exempt from short term rental policy.
New Graves Road has been going through changes after emergency services, the postal service, and delivery drivers were left confused.
Jeff Earlywine, county administrator, detailed two ordinances at Tuesday’s regular meeting. The ordinances were adopted back in 2021 and have failed to incorporate language relating to short term rental uses on New Graves Road.
Short-term rental property, in contrast to conventional rental property, is private, non-commercial housing whose owners rent out rooms for short stays, often only a few days. Popular online platforms for facilitating such rentals include websites like Airbnb and Vrbo.
“The first ordinance dealt with implementing the recommendations on the Graves Road interchange special annual study that resulted in three or four new zoning districts,” said Earlywine. “Graves Road residential districts, commercial district and business park district.”
The other issue occurred when the court had petitioned a special study from the planning commission involving promulgation irregularities, meaning issues with the administration’s final rule for short-term rental uses.
“We were having issues and the county worked in conjunction with the other cities to develop short term rental regulations in the zoning code as well as special licensing requirements to make sure that they didn’t have any adverse impacts in residential neighborhoods,” Earlywine stated.
Those two ordinances were happening simultaneously, causing an accidental omission from the planning commission.
“We failed to incorporate the language relating short term rental uses as either permitted or conditionally permitted use within those new Graves Road zoning districts,” Earlywine said.
Since the time that those two ordinances were adopted, several residents that live on the New Graves Road have expressed interest in delegating their units for short term rental use.
“We’ve had to advise them that this was accidentally left out and we couldn’t really help them,” said Earlywine. “So they don’t have the same opportunities as anyone else in county.”
Earlywine explained two options for these residents to have the same opportunities moving forward.
“We could wait until the next zoning update, but we don’t think that’s fair to these residents and others that are interested,” Earlywine said. “Or, we could go ahead and initiate a text amendment, work through the planning commission, bring that report back to the court and see if this court is then willing to incorporate those amendments into the Graves Road zoning districts like we’ve done for all other zoning districts across the county.”
Earlywine continued to summarize that if the resolution were to pass at Tuesday’s meeting, the text amendment process would go to the planning commission like every other text amendment. Then, fiscal court members would see it in about 90 days and decide whether to follow that text amendment.
Earlywine assured the court that this text amendment would not have special treatment, just the same opportunity everyone else in the county currently has in terms of short term rentals.