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APRIL 7, 2017 VOLUME 25, NO. 11
www.MountainViewOnline.com
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MOVIES | 28
Final five picked for MV rent control committee JUDGE RULES THAT CITY CAN ENACT MEASURE V WHILE LAWSUIT GOES THROUGH COURTS By Mark Noack
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fter months of screening candidates, Mountain View City Council members have finally landed on their picks for the city’s inaugural rental-housing committee. The five-person panel and one alternate member were chosen by the council after a final round of interviews at a Tuesday, April 4, meeting. The final committee choices are Tech Museum coordinator Emily Ramos, a renter; attorney Julian Pardo de Zela and former City Council member Tom Means, both homeowners; LinkedIn manager Matthew Grunewald, an apartment owner; and Vanessa Honey, a property manager for MPM Corporation. Evan Ortiz, a Google account manager who helped lead the successful campaign for the Measure V rent control law, was sidelined by the majority of council members who made him an alternate member of the committee. The council’s choice took on a new urgency the very next day, when a judge refused to grant an injunction that would prevent the city’s voter-approved rent control from being enacted until a landlord group’s lawsuit against it is fully resolved. While the council made its final choice for the rental housing committee at its April 4 meeting, council members had to hold off on formally appointing members until a ruling on the injunction was handed down.
Earlier on Tuesday, a judge heard oral arguments in the case over whether to grant a preliminary injunction that would continue blocking Measure V from being implemented. His decision was wasn’t expected for a week or more. But with the injunction request denied, the city will need to quickly take action to formally appoint the rental housing committee. (A Page 14 story on the hearing went to press Wednesday morning before the ruling was issued.) Political trade-offs In a final political trade-off, the council decided to bump accountant James Leonard from the committee. Leonard, a homeowner, was viewed as a middleof-the-road pick, but the council instead opted to replace him with Honey, a last-minute candidate who emerged after the process was reopened last month in a search for new applicants. Honey clearly won over both sides of the council as she was interviewed Tuesday and detailed her experience managing lowincome housing and rent-controlled units. She praised the Measure V rent-control law as well-written, and pledged to use her position to foster dialogue between renters and landlords. “A well-run committee could make fair decisions if we stay on task and understand what we’re being asked to do,” Honey said in her interview. “I’m a proponent of collaboration. We have to work together — we are a community.” See RENT CONTROL, page 9
MICHELLE LE
APRIL ADVENTURE Remember that warm dry weather we had at the start of the week? Asher, age 2, made the most of it on Tuesday as he clambered up the playground structure at Eagle Park under the watchful eye of his mother, Krista Nelson. The rainy weather forecast for Friday and Saturday is expected to clear up early next week.
New push to regulate Airbnb rentals COLLECTING TAXES ON THE 800 SHORT-TERM LISTINGS IN CITY COULD NET BIG BUCKS By Mark Noack
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avid Haedtler has what might seem like an unfathomable problem — he wants to pay his taxes, but the city of Mountain View is refusing his money. In fact, they sent him a letter a few months ago suggesting he stop sending in checks. Haedtler, like hundreds of other city residents, runs an Airbnb rental business out of his house. In Mountain View, Airbnb and other short-term rental sites
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aren’t formally recognized, and thus they remain technically illegal. But the lack of legal status hasn’t slowed Airbnb’s rise — in fact, quite the opposite. Since around 2010, the short-term rental business has seen meteoric growth. Today, the website hosts just under 800 listings in Mountain View, according to the data-analytics site AirDNA. Like many other Airbnb hosts, Haedtler wants to abide with the law. He paid for a business license and began setting aside about 10
percent of his revenues to pay the city in transient-occupancy taxes (TOT), the same fee that hotels or bed-and-breakfasts would have to pay. So he wrote a check for $1,300 and sent it off to City Hall, he said. “Airbnb should be paying TOT taxes just like a hotel does. I don’t think that a few regulations would hurt either,” he said. “As I read the city code, this didn’t seem like a gray area at all.” But city officials disagree. In See AIRBNB, page 6
Measure B parcel tax 8
VIEWPOINT 23 | WEEKEND 25 | GOINGS ON 29 | MARKETPLACE 30 | REAL ESTATE 32