By Bruce Lieberman
San Diego Union Tribune
December 14, 2007

SOLANA BEACH – Concerned that valuable hotel rooms could be converted to private residences and shut out tourists, the Solana Beach City Council has banned new time shares and other similar “condominium-hotel” arrangements.

Solana Beach may be the first coastal city in California to support such a ban, said James Lough, the city's attorney.

The council approved the ban Wednesday night and is scheduled to officially adopt the ordinance at its next meeting. It will become effective 30 days after that.

More than half a dozen residents urged the council to adopt the ban. Most said they viewed the conversion of hotel property into residences and time shares as privatizing precious coastal land that should be open to tourists.

“This is a big can of worms for a little town like us,” resident Gerri Retman told the council.

City officials had been contemplating a ban for nearly a year. The council had already passed a moratorium in January on such arrangements, collectively referred to as “condominium hotels.”

The ban approved Wednesday includes three general types of property arrangements within commercial areas of Solana Beach, which cover about 2 percent of the city.

The first is condominium-hotels. These are rooms or suites within a conventional hotel that are sold as private properties and then rented by their new owners for part of the year. A hotel that includes condominium-hotels can become more like a traditional apartment or condominium project, rather than a conventional hotel.

The second is known as a “fractional ownership facility” – created when hotels set aside a portion of their rooms as time shares.

The third covers time shares involving any other type of property. This category was included in the ban to prevent people from getting around the first two.

Existing time-share properties will not be affected by the ban – even if they are sold.

The council, which has a history of closely reviewing any development project along or near its 1.7-mile coastline, has been concerned that condominium-hotels, in the general sense, could make staying in Solana Beach too expensive for many tourists.

Condominium-hotels can be extremely pricey – more than $600 per night in some places along the California coast, according to a 2006 review by the California Coastal Commission.

The commission views condominium-hotels as unfriendly to tourists and antithetical to its philosophy of protecting public access to the coast. But the commission has struggled over how to regulate them.

Solana Beach Councilwoman Lesa Heebner, meanwhile, has questioned how the city could ensure that condominium-hotel owners don't limit the use of their units to themselves and their friends and not actually rent them to vacationers.

A year ago, the commission sent a letter to local governments encouraging them to not approve new condominium-hotel developments.

While they want to ban condominium-hotels in the city's commercial areas, council members have said they welcome traditional hotels such as the Marriott Courtyard and Holiday Inn. Together they offer 195 rooms, and they are the only hotels in town.

Before Wednesday's meeting, several residents had weighed in on the issue in messages to the city. Realtor Louise Abbott, director of a Solana Beach group called Real Property Rights, sent a letter Dec. 7 asking why the city wanted to undermine property ownership.

“Why would you want to make a financially reasonable way to own property in our very desirous town unattainable to many?” Abbott wrote. “By outlawing this form of ownership you would be needlessly shutting out opportunity to many.”

Others argued that allowing condominium-hotels would make the town's commercial areas “quasi-residential.”

“They are completely inappropriate in Solana Beach, given the fragile aspects of the lagoon and the increased traffic they will generate,” Solana Beach resident Susan Fellows wrote in an e-mail to the city.