The Dalles City Council held a marathon three and a half hour session last night, and the majority of it was taken up with residents on West Scenic Drive concerned about a firm that has purchased a number of houses in the neighborhood and converted them to short term rentals. Locals say that resulted in large groups renting the housing cluster, throwing late loud parties, wandering into people’s private property, causing traffic problems and other offenses. Last year, the city council passed a one-year moratorium on any new short term rental licenses, but that ends on November 26th.
After much discussion, City Manage Matthew Klebes summarized the contributions, which he said looked like a three-step implementation process:
“First is some consensus around council on changes to the proposed ordinance. They would include a 500-foot buffer instead of 300, a 500-foot notification instead of 300, consideration of some kind of buffer for non-residential STRs, adding a room definition, or clarifying a room definition, and making changes, or streamlining potential reporting procedure for concerns of violation.”
Councilors ultimately sent the ordinance back to staff to make those changes and will take up the revised proposal at their November 25 meeting.
And there was a weird twist at the meeting’s end. The last item on agenda was approval of a resolution raising the stipend paid to the city’s elected officials – that is, the mayor and members of the council. Back in April, the council approved it the raise, with the stipulation that the raise would only take effect when another person was elected to their position.
Councilors decided to modify that resolution so the raise would take effect for all councilors on January 1, 2025. In order to do so, councilors performed a bit of a parliamentary dance. First, Mayor Mays announced he had an active conflict of interest and so would abstain from voting on the issue. He then left the room. President of the Council Tim McGlothlin and Councilor Scott Randall followed, declaring their acrive conflict of interest and signed off their Zoom calls. That left councilors Dan Richardson, Rod Runyon and Darcy Long as a bare quorum. Runyon and Richardson both declared they had a potential conflict of interest, instead of an active one. That’s because they’re both up for re-election in November. The conflict only takes place if they win.
And Darcy Long has no conflict because she is not running for re-election. So she took the presider’s gavel, stepped down for a moment to make the the motion to approve the raise. Councilor Runyon seconded, and the vote for the raise was unanimous.
City Attorney Jonathan Kara said Oregon law allowed Runyon and Richardson to vote on the matter because their conflict of interest was potential rather than actual.