Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s head of global policy, appeared on Thursday before hundreds of American mayors with an enticing pitch: Team up with us to collect millions of dollars in taxes for you.

On Wednesday, however, the head of the hotel industry’s lobbying group had sent the same audience a very different message: Airbnb isn’t a good partner; it is breaking your city laws.

The heated battle between Airbnb, the popular room-sharing app, and the hotel industry is playing out in city halls across the country, including those in New York and Los Angeles, which have either passed or are considering restrictions on the service. Airbnb has fought back with a political ground campaign led by former White House advisers like Mr. Lehane, deploying them to small towns and organizing the company’s dedicated hosts and guests to protest restrictions.
This week, those differences are being aired at the United States Conference of Mayors, an event attended by local politicians with heavy influence over the future of the fast-changing lodging industry.

A sign supporting Prop F, which would have limited Airbnb in San Francisco, in the window of Box Dog Bikes. The proposition was defeated, helping Airbnb. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times
The appeals are taking many forms. Airbnb and the American Hotel & Lodging Association are both leading sponsors of the winter meeting, for example. But perhaps the sharpest debate is over numbers and facts.

In the speech on Thursday, Mr. Lehane asked mayors to team up with the company. In turn, Airbnb would begin to collect taxes. It now collects hotel, tourist and occupancy taxes, totaling around $42 million, in 16 cities and jurisdictions. And, according to a study commissioned by the company that Mr. Lehane presented, if the 50 biggest American cities teamed up with Airbnb, that number would rise to $200 million a year in taxes.

“We want to demonstrate a seriousness of purpose” to city leaders, Mr. Lehane said in an interview. “I’m not aware of any company standing up at the U.S. Conference of Mayors and saying, ‘Please tax us.’”

Katherine Lugar, president of the hotel association, on Wednesday presented a study her own group had commissioned. It said that an estimated $500 million in revenue had been collected by Airbnb hosts, whom the hotel group described as essentially professional landlords renting out rooms full time, a violation of many local laws.

“Our data is showing a tremendous growth of commercial operators who are exploiting sites like Airbnb to avoid paying taxes, following zoning rules and following basic laws for health and safety,” Ms. Lugar said in an interview.

The dueling data are not particularly new for these two sides. (Each says the other’s numbers have problems, too.) The data does show, though, how intense and local the debates about Airbnb have become.

Several mayors at the conference said their cities were struggling with laws that address the growing concerns about companies like Airbnb and Uber. The mayors of Columbus, Ohio; East Hartford, Conn.; and Aurora, Colo., described Airbnb’s offer to collect taxes as a first step.

Marcia A. Leclerc, the mayor of East Hartford, said Airbnb was banned in her city of 51,000. She said the city’s leaders wanted to see more efforts to ensure that guests receive the same level of safety and health guarantees as hotels.

“There is a reason why hotels are trusted brands,” she said, “because they have so many more regulations, and we’d want to see the same kinds of assurances from Airbnb.”

An increasing number of cities are proposing bans or stronger rules on short-term vacation rentals, efforts that have been encouraged by the hotel industry and by affordable housing advocates. In response, Airbnb has beefed up its lobbying and policy staff, just this week hiring four new members for its policy team, including Sarah Bianchi, President Obama’s former deputy assistant for economic policy. Mr. Lehane, who joined in August, is a former aide in the Clinton administration and met Ms. Bianchi while the two worked on Al Gore’s presidential bid.

“What’s different about Airbnb and other sharing-economy firms is that the wall between market strategy and nonmarket strategy like politics is completely broken down,” said Edward T. Walker, an associate professor of sociology at U.C.L.A. and the author of “Grassroots for Hire,” a book about industry campaigns to mobilize the public for political advocacy. “A lot of the action is on the local level, where you need a municipal strategy in place which requires a huge amount of specific local knowledge.”

In its San Francisco headquarters, the policy office is referred to by some as the “Obama White House West,” because of the large number of former administration officials who have joined the company. The company’s greatest strength, though, has been its 70 million combined hosts and guests, some of whom have become vocal advocates, as was demonstrated in a prominent victory in San Francisco in November.

Mr. Lehane is trying to replicate some of that success, organizing 100 clubs around the world to act as resources for Airbnb supporters who are protesting restrictions.

“The fact that Airbnb is creating what is a grass-roots army to fight this out in local city councils and local legislative districts,” Professor Walker said, “tells you a lot about how much they know they need to win in all of those localities, each with its own politics and history and incumbent actors.”

The company’s most recent tactic has been to try to work with local cities to collect lodging taxes. But some municipalities are turning down the offer, saying the downsides of letting residents rent out rooms on Airbnb are not worth the trade-offs.

Last month, despite Airbnb’s hiring of local lobbyists and organizers, the Santa Barbara City Council voted for a ban on short-term rentals, saying guests using the service had become a nuisance and were squeezing residents out of the local housing market. Within an hour’s drive from there, the City of Oxnard and Ventura County are proposing similar regulations. This week, the tiny wine town of Ojai unanimously approved rules that prevent short-term rentals on sites like Airbnb.

“We could probably collect somewhere in the range of $6 million a year of taxes from website companies, but in the end we felt that in order to limit growth and preserve the local quality of life, we would have to make difficult choices,” Gregg Hart, a Santa Barbara City Council member, said of the recent vote.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/technology/airbnb-takes-its-case-to-us-mayors-conference.html?_r=2