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Most Lake Placid vacation rental owners have now registered

LAKE PLACID — Most known short-term vacation rental owners in Lake Placid have now registered for a permit.

As of Friday, the village-town Building and Planning Department had received 436 applications for permits to operate a short-term vacation rental, according to Code Enforcement Officer Michael Orticelle.

Seventeen owners of rental properties who didn’t register on time were fined, according to Orticelle. The owners of those properties were fined between $350 and $1,000 based on different circumstances. Orticelle said several of those owners have since registered.

To complete an application, rental owners can visit secure.hostcompliance.com/north-elba-ny/permit-registration. More information on the short-term rental registration program can be found on the town of North Elba’s website at www.northelba.org/?page=government/code-enforcement/short-term-rental.

Owners of short-term vacation rentals are also required to register their properties with the Essex County Treasurer’s Office. They’ve been required to register with the county since 2016. Airbnb and VRBO don’t register users with the county — hosts have to do that on their own, though Airbnb voluntarily collects the county’s occupancy tax on behalf of its users and remits the revenue to the county. Visit www.co.essex.ny.us/downloads/roomoccupancytaxregistrationform2020.pdf to download the registration form.

The Land Use Code Review Steering Committee — a subset of the Lake Placid-North Elba Community Development Commission — asked the village Board of Trustees and the North Elba Town Council earlier this month if they would consider placing a moratorium on issuing any more permits for short-term vacation rentals for the next year. Randall reiterated at the board’s meeting Monday that the village and town attorneys have advised the municipalities to take no action on the request.

The village and town are both facing a legal challenge to the joint short-term vacation rental law, which they adopted in March.

Vacation rental owners Douglas Calvey, Stephen Kyle Korman, Huda Scheidelman, Carol Hoffman and Neil Sullivan filed a lawsuit against the municipalities in June, alleging that the law is unconstitutional; violates their civil, First Amendment and property rights; violates due process; and “substantially burdens” them by capping the number of days their units can be rented, according to court documents.

That lawsuit, which seeks to void the law, is ongoing.

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