La Quinta Noise Pilot Program Ends; Will Ban On New STVR’s Expire?

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The city of La Quinta has had a long-standing moratorium in place banning new short-term vacation rentals. A big reason, noise complaints, and because of the many complaints, the city initiated a noise monitoring program to see if it might help.

The pilot program is now complete and the results were presented to the city during a city council meeting Tuesday.

"Here’s Minut, meet Minut," introduced Tyler Fabschutz, Consultant with Minut.

With noise complaints rising over the past year, the city of La Quinta is hoping new technology will help battle noise complaints coming from short-term rentals by depending on devices like Minut, rather than using city resources.

"Can they help us either prevent complaints from taking place and disturbances or help STVR operators effectively respond to issues that are happening at the property," said Chris Escobedo, Director of Community Resources with the City of La Quinta.

Both residents and companies like Airbnb and Expedia are waiting in anticipation to see if there will be a solution to noise posed by short-term rentals and if the long-standing moratorium will expire.

"Whether it relates to the moratorium, that wasn’t the basis of this pilot. but overall what we’ve seen and the findings we’ll share later this evening with the council is that for outdoor noise events 83% of the time they were responded to or addressed within 30 minutes," explained Escobedo.

I think the reaction is going to be great, I think the city council is going to hear very compelling results of the past three months.

And as far as how these devices work, people do not have to worry about having their personal conversations recorded.

"It’s just recording decibel levels so we don’t record conversations, we don’t care what people are saying, Alexa might, right, but we just want to know how loud it is, and for how long it is loud," explained Fabschutz.

At the end of the day, devices like Minut are hoping to prove that noisy neighbors are a thing of the past.

"If you’re a noisy guest, you get an angry neighbor knocking on your door, you get a police officer knocking on your door, or you can get a gentle text saying hey we’ve detected too much noise from this unit can you please keep it down," added Fabschutz.

Moving forward city council will take a look at the results of the noise program and hopefully determine if the moratorium banning new short-term vacation rentals will stay in place.