City begins short-term rental planning

Council supports regulating short-term rentals

May 28, 2019 | 8:54 PM

It’s something that has come about thanks to tourism trends and now communities across the province are taking action-including the City of Vernon.

Council voted to support the planning process for short term rental regulations at their meeting on Monday.

The city has over 300 short-term rental listings available during the high tourism season.

And according to a staff report, 82 per cent of those listings involve renting out the whole property.

The city argues that without regulations, the long- term rental market, and neighborhoods may take a hit.

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“A lack of affordable rental housing is an issue in this and many other communities and there are negative impacts such as, reduced long-term rental stock, and parking demand in residential neighborhoods,” one city staff member said.

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Before council came to a vote; Coun. Brian Quiring suggested that the city look into what other communities are doing to regulate short-term rentals.

“Isn’t there like three or four benchmark communities that we could look at that have done this before?” he said.

“Because this really does seems like a huge amount of work for an already highly overworked part of our city,” he added.

Coun. Scott Anderson disagreed with Quiring and said that the city needs a made in Vernon solution.

“We have to be really careful with this issue, it’s not something that we can just look at best practices for,” he said.

“In some cases it involves people’s life savings and or their ability to pay their mortgage,” said Anderson.

He added that short-term rentals, such as the ones listed on the popular website Airbnb should be subject to the same taxes and regulations as hotel operators.

“Personally I would like to see Airbnb operators operating on a level playing field as hotels,” he said.

Coun. Quiring quickly backtracked and said that he too would like to see short-term rentals pay the hotel tax.

“Actually I totally agree with Scott, I would like to see Airbnb continue, but have them pony up their share of the hotel room tax.”

Coun. Kari Gares also agreed with Anderson’s idea and said that what the city needs is a balance when it comes to imposing regulations.

“I actually agree with the process as well, anytime you start regulating things that could impact other people financially, I think its a balance that we need to strike” she said.

Mayor Victor Cumming highlighted that Vernon is unique compared to other communities and that short-term rental bylaws need to reflect the differences.

“Vernon is slightly different from other communities because we have a two-humped camel tourism industry. We have both the winter and the summer. Lots of places just deal with this months in the year and go with the flow, things go back to normal during the winter and then things start up again in the fall and summer, this is not the case here,” he said.

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The planning process is expected to begin by November 2019.

The city says consultation with the public and other tourism-related stakeholders will take place.

A total of $5000 will be spent by the city in order to properly engage with the public through open houses, surveys and pamphlets.

A draft bylaw is expected to come back to council for their consideration by spring 2020.