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City Council passes hotel regulations overhaul

Staff //October 9, 2019//

City Council passes hotel regulations overhaul

Staff //October 9, 2019//

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After months of discussion between lawmakers and stakeholders, Charleston City Council has passed a new accommodations ordinance for the Holy City.

An 11-member task force comprising city council members, community advocates and leaders in the hospitality industry spent a month discussing recommendations before handing a proposed ordinance to City Council at the end of May.

The Planning Commission also weighed in on the ordinance (.pdf), and the hotel task force met again to make final suggestions before City Council voted on second and third readings.

Changes to the accommodations regulations include a limit on “full-service” hotels, a term used for large hotels with conference and meeting space, an on-site restaurant and other amenities; a fee imposed on new hotels to help fund affordable housing in Charleston; and stricter guidelines for the Board of Zoning Appeals to follow when considering hotel projects.

The ordinance also includes protections for existing residential, office and retail space downtown to prevent those uses from being displaced off the peninsula. A proposed ban on new rooftop bars was tabled for further discussion within its own ordinance.

“Downtown has changed. … Things have drastically changed,” said District 10 Councilman Harry Griffin, who’s running for mayor. “This ordinance isn’t going to change that … but you can’t take away all of our work that the members of the committee did to give us something that is better than we have now.”

Kristopher King, executive director of the Preservation Society of Charleston, told City Council last month he was concerned by how fast the ordinance moved from the task force to ratification by City Council, but he feels it’s a good ordinance.

“This balances growth, this protects businesses, office use, retail use,” he said. “This does what we need it to do. This is a good ordinance and I think it’s going to better allow us to measure the negative impacts and the positive benefits of … hotels moving forward.”

Winslow Hastie, president and CEO of Historic Charleston Foundation and a member of the hotel task force, said he hopes the process of pulling stakeholders together to work on complex issues is used for future policy discussions in the city.

“The way it was done, in the spirit of collaboration and the spirit of moving constructive policy forward, was really excellent,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, we’ve reached a very high degree of consensus, which is pretty incredible given this pretty controversial issue.”

The hotel task force intends to continue working on hotel regulations and other related issues.

“At the end of the day, this is a much better … product as a result of this collaboration,” said Mayor John Tecklenburg.

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