Hilton Head council opens wide-ranging debate on pause for new short-term rentals and subdivisions

Mayor Perry opened an extended workshop Sept. 16 on whether the town should pause approvals for new short-term rentals, timeshares and major subdivisions while staff and council finish rewriting land-use rules.

Staff and the town attorney told council a moratorium is legally possible but must be based on clear, data-driven findings linking a specific problem to a regulatory remedy. "You have to know what your problem is, you have to know how to fix it, and then you have to take the steps to fix it," Town Attorney Curtis Coltrane said. He cautioned the council that the enabling ordinance should spell out factual findings and a clear plan for how the town will address the harms it identifies.

Deputy Town Manager Sean Leininger presented the staff dataset the town has compiled: the town’s permit and county records put the working estimate of licensed short-term-rental units on the island at about 7,042; the largest concentrations are in planned developments (PUDs) and resort districts. Leininger said the town has received hundreds of complaints but that only a subset — 147 complaints from Jan. 1 to Aug. 1 — required verified enforcement action. He also noted the fire department began a new one-year tracking program on Sept. 1 to catalog emergency responses to STR properties.

"A moratorium is a temporary pause," Leininger told council. "It allows us to study effects, prevent preemptive applications and manage impacts on community character and infrastructure while we draft regulations." He said staff aims to present a draft municipal-code package to the community-services committee and bring a code workshop to council by the end of the year; district-plan workshops are scheduled for October.

Mayor Perry said he is opposed to a blanket moratorium: "I am not for a moratorium on short-term rentals. No. It is our future," he said, urging that the town instead continue to refine enforcement and the pending code changes. Several council members, while expressing concern about neighborhood impacts and life-safety risks in very large rental properties, asked staff to return quickly with targeted regulation ideas on occupancy limits, parking enforcement and life-safety standards.

The public-comment period exceeded three hours and sharply divided residents, industry and community groups. Petition organizer Richard Bussey urged a short, targeted pause to give the town time to craft rules: "This is simply a six-month pause — nothing more — to give our community time for a thorough, thoughtful review and to develop sensible guidelines," he said. By contrast, a broad set of real-estate and business speakers warned a moratorium would damage property values, deter buyers and put local tax revenue at risk. "A moratorium will interfere with property owners' ability to sell, cause disputes with properties under contract and put our schools and beaches at risk," said Jocelyn Steiger of the Hilton Head Area Realtors.

Several residents and council members pressed staff to prioritize life-safety items: Leininger said the fire department recommended monitored-smoke alarms and other requirements for very large homes (staff previously suggested a 3,600-square-foot threshold for additional life-safety equipment).

After public comment and council discussion, the mayor asked staff to draft a set of municipal-code amendments for the community-services committee and to prepare, as requested by several council members, a narrowly defined short pause on new STR applications that would preserve renewals for currently permitted units. Council also committed to hold additional special meetings to consider draft regulations and to try to move any committee-recommended changes through the council process in time to affect the 2026 permit cycle if possible.

Town Attorney Coltrane reiterated the legal path: any pause must include findings tying the pause to identifiable harms and a timeline for adopting corrective regulations. "If you proceed, plan on a data-driven, deliberative process that explains the problem, the detrimental effect, and how the proposed ordinance will fix it," he said.

Council did not adopt a moratorium ordinance on Sept. 16. Instead, members directed staff to prepare targeted municipal-code amendments and to return with draft language and a recommended time-limited pause narrowly scoped to new STR applications while the committee and council consider the code changes. The community-services committee has scheduled a special meeting Oct. 6 to review proposed regulations.