The Sonoma County Community and Local Law Enforcement Task Force met on Monday as part of an ongoing attempt to reform and retool law enforcement protocols in the wake of the October 2013 shooting death of Andy Lopez.

Much of the work of the task force—created by Sonoma County officials—has dealt with perceived shortcomings in the way the Lopez death was handled, and to study a set of issues put to them by Sonoma leaders: the feasibility of an independent citizen review body; recommended options for “community policing”; a deep-dive on the subject of whether the coroner’s office should be split from the purview of the sheriff’s office; and community concerns not otherwise included in the county to-do list.

Lopez, a young Santa Rosan, was shot and killed by Sheriff’s Deputy Erick Gelhaus, who believed the Airsoft rifle the 13-year-old was carrying was a real gun.

The state and now Sen. Barbara Boxer have taken up the issue of gun safety and toy guns. Last year, legislation mandating better identification markings on these guns was sponsored by State Sen. Noreen Evans and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. Boxer’s bill follows on with a call to broaden the Evans bill to a national standard for fake-gun safety.

“No child should ever die because a police officer or anyone else mistakes a toy gun for a real weapon,” Boxer said in a statement. “This legislation will protect our kids and help law enforcement by making sure that imitation firearms cannot be mistaken for real firearms.”

Boxer said that she asked the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission to review the Evans bill, designed to make sure that “toy guns are clearly distinguishable from real guns by requiring that all imitation firearms sold in the state be painted a bright color or feature bright fluorescent stripes.”

She asked the federal agency to adopt the California standard on toy-gun safety.

The task force’s job is of a different sort—concerned less with fake guns than with changing procedures in Sonoma County. One of its early recommendations sought to have Gelhaus removed from his job, but Sonoma District Attorney Jill Ravitch exonerated the deputy last July following an internal investigation of the events surrounding the tragic encounter with Lopez.

A core issue in the task force’s work: Who should investigate officer-involved shootings? The task force found the civil grand jury process not up to the task of investigating officers: “While [it] may investigate officer-involved fatalities, it does not have the resources to perform in-depth reviews or lengthy investigations
of every officer-involved fatality. . . . Find another mechanism for accountability in law enforcement other than the Grand Jury.”

The task force said on Monday that the Sonoma Coroner’s Unit should be divested from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. The Coroner’s Unit is an investigative arm of the department; its staff is primarily Sonoma County law enforcement.

The task force cited the implicit conflict of interest: “Among the Coroner’s general duties, the Coroner is charged with the specific responsibility of determining cause of death in incidents where an individual dies while in the custody of the Sheriff or by actions taken involving employees of the Sheriff.”

They suggested a county office of the medical examiner could provide independence the necessary to ensure an unbiased evaluation of an officer-related shooting.

It will be up to the county supervisors to decide which, if any, of the recommendations are taken up legislatively.

Thanks to Airbnb, it’s easier than ever to find a room for the night in the North Bay. But local county governments have taken different approaches to the online short-term rental site. They’re eager for the additional tax revenues in Marin and Sonoma counties, and anxious to preserve housing in Napa County.

Sonoma and Marin counties have tried to level the playing field so that renters who register their business and pay the transient-occupancy tax (TOT) are allowed to do business.

But Napa County isn’t buying into the Airbnb model. The county limits vacation rentals of less than 30 days. The rationale has been to preserve the agriculture by keeping a lid on excessive short-term rentals—and to preserve the limited stock of affordable housing for the people who live and work in Napa County.

“Rental homes and Airbnb homes take up stock that can otherwise be used for working families,” says David Morrison, Napa County’s director of the county Department of Planning, Building And Environmental Services. Short-term rentals, he says, throw the county’s ratio of jobs-to homes ratio out of balance (it’s currently 1.4 jobs for every home).

“We are exactly where we need to be,” says Morrison “For us, it’s not a revenue issue, it’s a land-management and housing issue. In Napa County, our primary concern is housing, and that’s the driver here.”

Still, there are hundreds Airbnb listings for Napa County. Morrison says that since October, county code enforcement officers have been identifying “10 to 20 a week in terms of tracking them down and trying to discourage them.”

Sonoma County has meanwhile embarked on an audit of existing vacation rentals, and has identified, to date, 580 outliers in its midst. The county is working with landlords in order to get those much-desired TOT dollars.

The Airbnb climate is also amenable to short-term renters in Marin County. In 2013, Marin County offered amnesty to any persons operating an under-the-radar vacation rental and said they had to come forward or face sanctions that ran all the way to jail time.

The amnesty ran for a couple of months in late 2013 and yielded an initial 60 new operators on top of the 324 that had been registered by that point. By Nov. 2014, the number was up to 457 registered operators, “largely due to the continued effort of staff to enforce TOT compliance measures,” says Roy Given, director of finance for Marin County.

The Bohemian tallied at least a thousand listings on Airbnb in the county. Many are established and licensed players who are jumping on the Airbnb site to maximize their marketing. And those
include all the rentals in cities
like Sonoma, which set their own TOT rate.

Given’s office reports that TOT lodging across the county “generated tax of $2,632,324 in 2013–14, a jump of some $400,000 from the year before; $2.1 million was collected in District 4, aka the coastal wonderland of West Marin, in 2013–14.

Ramon Cadiz, president of the West Marin Chamber of Commerce says the Airbnb phenomenon is likely a net-positive for the county, which has experienced a huge uptick in tourism—and that most of the concerns he’s heard from hospitality businesses are about fairness.

Fairness in this case means: pay the 10 percent county occupancy tax that out-front operators pay.

“I don’t hear a clamor from anyone who’s saying this is undercutting my business because they’re not paying the 10 percent TOT,” says Cadiz. “None of those people seem to be howling for blood.”

Cadiz is a lifelong West Marin resident who recalls a time when the area was a tourist wasteland. “People couldn’t wait to get out of there. That’s changed.”

The Airbnb phenomenon, he adds, “coincides with several trends that have intersected—the foodie phenomenon, the bicycle phenomenon. The bicycle numbers are just off the charts here. People couldn’t get out of Marshall fast enough 30 years ago, but if you go there now, it’s just a traffic jam—bicycles, cars going to the oyster companies, the kayaking thing.”

Cadiz adds that the so-called golden age of the bed and breakfast has come and gone. “Now kids don’t want to stay in a traditional B&B. They just want the keys for the house, and they’ll pay the premium. They don’t need someone to make breakfast—’We just want to ride our bikes out to the point.'”

Sonoma County started taking a hard look at short-term vacation rentals last September, just as an annual report on tourism identified it as an emerging trend.

Paul Cocking, an official in the county’s investment and debt office, explains that county supervisors have worked to embrace the new economy legislatively.

Sonoma County wants to collect its share of the TOT from off-the-books operators, which is 9 percent in the unincorporated parts of the county.

The county reports that “Sonoma County’s transient occupancy tax receipts totaled $27.5 million in 2013 after adjusting for inflation. This is the highest level of TOT receipts that Sonoma County has ever received.”

And they want more.

The tourism report noted that “an increasing number of individual owner-operated short-term rentals are appearing in Sonoma County, and are being promoted through travel websites such as VRBO.com and Airbnb.com. Within these sites, individual owners are able to solicit travelers by listing their properties as either entire-home or private-room rentals, despite not being registered for TOT collection within Sonoma County.”

Cocking identified a two-fold push by county supervisors in coming months as they continue to work with the issues raised by the advent of Airbnb.

“First, how much of this is enough, or too much? We do have areas, Healdsburg and Sonoma, that have high areas of VRBOs, and that is definitely causing problems. Also, they are looking at the impact on affordable housing.”

Another issue is overall compliance with county regulations. The county gives its imprimatur to a vacation-home renter when the renter registers and the county collects the TOT—but there’s a gray area whereby in doing so, Airbnb listers may not be following the same health and safety guidelines required of, say, the Marriott Hotel.

“We do have a vacation-rental ordinance that covers that,” says Cocking, though he adds that the concern is “spot on—the rules and regulations that apply to a large establishment are definitely not being enforced, they may not be enforceable.”

The Sonoma County supervisors, he says, are looking to change the vacation-rental ordinance to include the “health and safety side of it.”

“It’s bigger than we thought,” Cocking says of the Airbnb phenomenon. “We’re looking to create as level a playing field as possible at this point.”

Cocking says he’s seen a big uptick in the number of people coming forward to comply. But he says the county is not ready to identify any gap between the collectible TOT and what’s actually been collected. The numbers are fluid and the audit is ongoing.

And he cautions that it’s unclear whether people coming in out of the cold were longstanding scofflaws, or if there’s that many new short-term landlords out there who are eager to take advantage of a booming tourist economy.

“The scofflaws we’ve caught, we’ve talked to, they either self-report or a neighbor rats them out,” he says. Eighty to 90 percent of the time they are unaware of the TOT, and they are usually very good about it. There is a small percentage seriously trying to undermine” efforts to bring everyone into compliance.

Cadiz in West Marin says Airbnb’s intersection with affordable housing isn’t problematic, as is the case in Napa.

The bigger issue, he says, are second homes that are unoccupied for much of the year. “The problem isn’t Airbnb, it’s empty houses,” he says.

Airbnb, he adds, “seems to be used by young, well-funded, tech-savvy smart people. These kids are younger than 30, and they maybe don’t know until Thursday where they are going to spend Friday night. ‘It’s not going to be foggy out in Bolinas this weekend, let’s see what we can book. And we’re going to book it right now.’ That’s the revolution.”

This is a big deal in West Marin. Last year the county collected $2.1 million in TOT revenues; the year before, it collected $1.8 million.

“They are clamoring for some of this money out here, because unincorporated West Marin costs more to the county than it earns for the county,” Cadiz says. Those costs include county money spent on civil service jobs, police and fire. “We spend more than we get, even given the property tax.”

Marin County takes in a half-billion in taxes a year, he says, “but two-thirds is already allocated. That’s why they are so interested in this TOT, this $1.8 million—this was an amount of money that never existed before.”

Airbnb is also just getting up to speed in the TOT collection game. “We have begun collecting and remitting these taxes on behalf of our hosts and guests in Portland and San Francisco and will take the lessons we learn there and move forward,” says an Airbnb spokeswoman via email, referencing those two cities recent TOT victories.

“We’ve had good conversations with officials in cities all over the world about these types of taxes, and even though this is a complicated challenge, we want to work together to ensure that tax rules for home sharing are clear, fair and easy to follow.”