YACHATS – Illegal vacation rental homeowners in Yachats beware. The city is updating its computer software with a program that scours the internet to find vacation listings and report them to the city, which will then verify whether they are licensed before notifying the owner.
Operating a vacation rental without a license from the city is subject to a $1,000-a-day fine for each day it is listed. The city has 125 licenses available. All are currently issued, and as of June there were five on the waiting list. The city collects a 9 percent tax on rents collected.
“We are pretty sure that there are people who are not doing that process, but we don’t really have a way to verify that,” city manager Bobbi Price told the city council last week. Then added the new software will provide proof.
“It’s the same system that Lincoln County uses, and I know that it works because I know people who’ve gotten those letters that were renting without licenses,” Price added. “And it works, they stopped. They don’t want to have those fines, they don’t want to be in trouble for it. But they were willing to fly under the radar as long as they could. So I think that that’s probably happening here, and we’re going to be able to find that out through the system.”
MuniRevs is a widely used software platform designed specifically for local governments to automate business licensing, sales tax collection, and revenue management. It allows municipalities to streamline paperwork, enforce compliance, and offers businesses a self-service portal for online filing and payments.
In addition to tracking vacation rentals, the city is adding MuniRevs software to handle tax and business license fee collections. The initial one-time fee to the city for the tax administration and business package is $7,800, with an annual recurring services charge of $25,300. The software that searches for unlicensed rentals has a one-time fee of $2,500 and an annual fee of $5,005.
“It’s fairly expensive, but it’s going to be quite a bit better than our old Go Yachats system,” said city recorder Neal Morphis. “That system is definitely showing its age, and we’re not really able to customize anything or really change the alerts that go out at this point. Whereas this new system will be highly customizable, and we’ll be able to collect payments directly through it instead of directing people to a different website to make a payment.”
The software is expected to be fully operational within the next two months.
— Garret Jaros/Lincoln Chronicle
