Miamisburg City Council voted unanimously Tuesday evening to approve the ordinance.
“What we’re trying to do here is to make sure that everybody that utilizes a hotel in the city has an opportunity to do that in a safe, comfortable environment,” Fine said.
Work on the measure started about six months ago “as a result of some issues we were having at a couple of hotels here in the city,” Fine said.
Miamisburg shut down the Rodeway Inn on Byers Road Oct. 30, after getting a court injunction calling it “a threat to the health, safety and welfare of the community.” The city called that motel “a hotbed of criminal nuisance activity — primarily related to illegal drug use,” noting two deaths in a one-month span due to drug overdoses.
This year, under Miamisburg’s new ordinance, permit applications will be due by April 1 and issued by July 1. Starting with permits for the 2025 calendar year, each motel or hotel will be required to submit an annual permit application to the city by Nov. 1, Fine said.
Applications will then be routed through the city’s police, development and finance departments, as well as the Miami Valley Fire District, for review and possible feedback. The city will then decide which permits will be issued by Jan. 1.
Permits must be displayed prominently at the front desk area of the hotel. Hotel or motel operators must allow the city and the fire department to inspect the property, and permits are non-transferable, so if ownership changes, the new operators would need to file for a permit, he said.
Under the ordinance, permits can be denied, approved or approved with conditions, Fine said. Miamisburg may deny a permit based on specific criteria, including fire code violations, having a public safety calls-for-service ratio over 1.2 per room during the last 12-month period, being designated a chronic nuisance, or violation of Ohio extended stay laws.
“It’s an attempt to work with the owners rather than being heavy handed or punitive in any way and give us an opportunity to kind of sit at the table and talk through any issues that we might find ... before they get worse,” Fine told this news outlet.
The city also can deny a permit to a hotel or motel that knowingly lies on its application, rents to a person on a court-maintained trespass list, if the owner, applicant, operator or manager has been convicted of prostitution-related crimes or on the basis of any prostitution-related crimes that occur at the site.
If denied, a hotel or motel would close down until they satisfy the reason for which their permit was denied, Fine said.
Miamisburg can hold off on denying, revoking or suspending a permit if the owner/operators do any number of more than a dozen measures or other actions that the city’s police chief determine would help the situation, Fine said.
“By doing that we are, in effect, approving the permit with conditions,” he said.
Some of those measures include sending staff to safety and security training and/or training to identify criminal activity such as human trafficking; installing closed-circuit security cameras with recording capabilities; and routine inspections of the property’s exterior doors to ensure they are not propped open. Other requirements include 24-hour presence of special duty uniformed police or qualified security, recording registered guests’ vehicle description and license plate and the number of guests staying in a room and installing and maintaining adequate lighting in all parking areas to illuminate guests’ vehicles.
“The list is really meant to be able to respond to whatever specific issue we might be trying to address, “Fine said.
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