ANNA MARIA – Vacation rental owners in Anna Maria will be charged $58.52 per occupant allowed when paying their 2021 vacation rental registration fees.
The 2021 registration fees were established on Jan. 28 with the city commission’s adoption of Resolution 21-767. When presenting the resolution, City Attorney Becky Vose said the annual registration fees are based on how much it cost the city to regulate vacation rentals. She noted each fee is based on the occupancy allowed at that specific vacation rental.
“A vacation rental that has a small occupancy pays a whole lot less than some vacation rental that has a very large occupancy,” Vose said.
Mayor Dan Murphy has stated in past years that the registration fees are intended to be a break-even revenue source to cover the city’s costs and are not intended to be a profit generator for the city.
After noting the 2021 fee will be $58.52 per occupant allowed, Murphy said the lowest registration fee will be the $234.08 paid by the owner of a one-bedroom vacation rental that allows two guests in the bedroom and two additional guests. The registration fee for a six-occupant vacation rental home or unit in Anna Maria was $309 in 2020 and will be $351 in 2021, he added.
According to the fee chart included in the meeting packet, the owner of a 10-occupant vacation rental will pay a $585.20 registration fee. The owner of an 18-occupant vacation rental will pay $1,053.36. The highest fee listed is $1,697.08 for a 29-occupant vacation rental.
Murphy said the annual registration fees are developed based on the city’s vacation rental-related administrative costs, enforcement costs, legal costs, lobbyist costs and other costs associated with vacation rental regulation.
Those total costs are then divided by the total number of vacation rental occupancies allowed in Anna Maria. According to Murphy, there are about 630 vacation rental units in Anna Maria.
This year’s fee increase reflects the city’s increased legal costs, labor costs, administrative costs, and lobbying costs, he said.
He also said, “We’re doing some new things in the enforcement of the ordinance – the way that we’re tracking vacation rentals that fly under the radar. We’ve become a little bit more sophisticated in how we’re analyzing that data so that we can find people that are ignoring the ordinance.”
