Short Term Rental Regulations Pass and Commissioner Bill Lisle Removed from PlanNing and Zoning Board

Monday, April 22, 2024, the Plano City Council passed a strict Short Term Rental Ordinance and Registration process. Residents have been waiting two long years for this day. The ordinance that passed bans all new Short Term Rentals in single family residential areas. Those existing before the temporary ban will be grandfathered in, so people dealing with a terrible Short Term Rental may have to continue to deal with it.
The new ordinance will allow Short Term Rentals in nonresidential and some multifamily areas. Short Term Rentals with a person living on the property full time will also be allowed on heritage properties.
The ordinance requires all Short Term Rental owners to register with the city. The registration will cost $300. If the property owner takes a training course, they can get a $100 discount on the registration fee. Also, if the police don't get any calls for service for the property within a certain time period, the owner can get another $100 off the fee. The owners must get liability insurance in the amount of $1 million. The property must have outside video cameras and a noise monitoring system. The owner or a designee must be able to respond to a problem within an hour of it being reported. The host rules and registration must be posted in the Short Term Rental. The owner must pay the hotel/motel taxes to the city, and the owner must rent it out for a minimum of two nights. A property owner can lose their registration if there are too many calls to the police, too many problems at the home, and other things listed in the ordinance.
The only area of contention that came up was when Councilwoman Holmer wanted a lower registration fee for the Short Term Rental owners who live in the home and only rent one bedroom out. The council decided to revisit this at a later time.
The majority of the speakers who came to comment on the ordinance and registration were in favor of the above rules, and they passed the council 7-0.
The other item that happened on Monday was the removal of Commissioner Bill Lisle from the Planning and Zoning Board. You will not find this section of the meeting on PlanoTV. The meeting was held before the Preliminary Council Meeting without cameras present. The reason for Commissioner Lisle’s removal goes back to his request at the September 5, 2023 Planning and Zoning Meeting of “A review of the application of Residential Adjacency Standards as applied in Zoning Case 2021-012 and the adoption of ordinance #2021-9-26. This request is an appeal under sec 1.1100 interpretations within our zoning ordinance.”  You can see him making his request at https://planotx.new.swagit.com/videos/270817 during Items for Future Agendas at the 16:51 time mark.
Zoning Case 2021-012 and the revised site plan 2021-024 was heard at the September 7, 2021 Planning and Zoning meeting. You can see that meeting and the case at https://planotx.new.swagit.com/videos/09082021-773
and click on Item 1A & 1B. The case had to do with the Home Depot located on 75 and 13th/14th connector. The store wanted to put a tool rental center and open storage within 30 feet of residential houses. At the time Councilman Horne was a commissioner on Planning and Zoning.
At the September 2023 Planning and Zoning meeting Commissioner Lisle simply asked for a review and appeal to be discussed at the next meeting. For that request he got a phone call from Councilman Rick Horne asking him to step down. On October 2nd, Commissioner Lisle spoke during the Comments of Public Interests part of the meeting. He brought to light that he was asked to step down and refused to. You can see his comments at https://planotx.new.swagit.com/videos/273062 under Comments of Public Interests. The City Council’s response to Commissioner Lisle’s simple request is very strange and fishy. Why remove someone just for asking to review Residential Adjacency Standards and a site plan? Well, it could be the fact that, according to Commissioner Lisle, the site plan for Home Depot is illegal.  
Commissioner Lisle talked with The Dallas Express about the Home Depot case. He told the paper, “We have adjacency standards in the City of Plano. When you add that use … to a site plan, residential adjacency standards apply to it because you don’t want to put this thing right next to a residential neighborhood. The Home Depot in question is on North Central Expressway near the Douglass community.” Lisle continued on by saying, “operating a tool center sometimes requires turning machines on and off, which would create noise pollution for residents in Douglass. It was one of the reasons Plano’s residential adjacency standards were created. [Planning and development] restrictions on that site said, you cannot expand the building and add open storage. Instead of applying [that] to the entire use like the zoning ordinance said you have to do, they drew a line out for the tool rental stored outside. But that’s literally 30 feet away from people’s homes.” 
Commissioner Lisle was appointed to the Planning and Zoning Board in 2022 and made it clear to council members, before his appointment, he was going to bring up the Home Depot site plan problems. Commissioner Lisle brought his concerns about  the site plan being “illegal” to City Manager Mark Israelson and his Deputy Jack Carr in August of 2022. According to the Dallas Express, “The following month, in a subsequent meeting with Director of Planning Christina Day and Lori Schwarz of the City’s Neighborhood Services Division, Day allegedly said, “Technically, you are correct, Bill.” However, nothing was done to fix the problem. Commissioner Lisle kept asking city staff about the issue.
Commissioner Lisle went on to tell the Dallas Express, “So, the City Council appointed me to a second full term, and a couple of weeks later, I bring this up [at the September Planning and Zoning Meeting]. Then, I was approached by a City Council member [who said] he had talked to six officials in the City of Plano asking me to [tender] my resignation two days later.” He also told the paper, “On October 11, I had a follow-up meeting with Horne. He said, ‘I’m going to come clean. I left a meeting with the mayor … and they were looking to remove you. The Home Depot situation is part of why they wanted you gone.” Commissioner Lisle commented that he has audio evidence of the conversations between himself and Councilman Horne.  You can read the full Dallas Express article at https://dallasexpress.com/metroplex/local-officials-ethics-complaint-falls-flat/
Commissioner Lisle decided to file an Ethics complaint against City Attorney Mims, City Manager Mark Israelson, Council Member Rick Horne, Mayor John B. Muns, Mayor Pro-Tem Kayci Prince, Deputy City Manager Jack Carr, Deputy City Manager Michelle D’Andrea, and Planning & Zoning Commission Chair David Downs for trying to force his resignation from the Planning and Zoning Board. The ethics claim was dismissed three days later. That may be the fastest ethics investigation I have ever seen.  
That brings us to April 22, 2024. In a meeting that was not televised, the City Council voted 6-2 to remove Commissioner Bill Lisle from the Planning and Zoning Board. Councilmen Ricciardelli and Williams were the minority votes.
To sum this whole thing up, A Commissioner thinks a sight plan was revised incorrectly. He tried going through staff to fix the problem, but was ignored. The Opening Meetings Act will not allow him to have private conversions with his fellow board members about the issue. The only thing he can do is bring it up at a Planning and Zoning meeting to put it on a future agenda. For that he is asked to step down. He files an ethics complainant and in only three days it is dismissed. He is removed from the board, in what looks like retaliation, for bringing problems to light and filing an ethics complaint. The message is clear: keep your month shut, do what we tell you to do, and don’t point out when the city does the wrong thing. This attitude reminds me of a famous quote. “Don’t go against the family.”
This is M. Lema for Plano’s Political Pit Bull