The Town of Gibsons is moving closer to imposing regulations on short-term rentals.
The Town’s current business licence bylaws cover only bed and breakfast operations or full-scale tourist accommodations.
According to Town planning staff, there are 34 licensed bed and breakfasts in Gibsons, and in a report presented to council’s May 8 committee of the whole meeting, they said at last count there were some 49 short-term rentals posted on the Airbnb platform alone.
The report said the bylaw department has had complaints about short-term rentals and it singles out one property, which is frequently rented out to parties of 12.
Bylaw officer Sue Booth told councillors as many as seven new short-term rental listings pop up online every week, including boats and converted garden sheds. “We’ll send them a letter saying we’ve identified their property as being on Airbnb or a homeshare and we’re going to require a business licence from you and at that point they remove the listing,” she said. “It happens quite a lot.”
The report also laid out how Tofino, Nelson, Whistler and Sechelt have dealt with the burgeoning short-term rental sector.
Mayor Wayne Rowe said the first step is to settle the question of whether the goal is to regulate short-term rentals or try to prohibit them. “There’s also the question of whatever route we might go down, whether there’s some consultation that needs to take place. We haven’t had, I don’t think, any specific consultation in our community around it.”
Coun. Silas White noted that a community dialogue late last year tackled the subject, and as a councillor it’s one of the topics residents have been raising to him. “As far as consultation, I feel like I’ve been hearing from people about this from all sides and people who are just concerned about various aspects of it for a couple of years now, and we probably all have.”
Councillors said they were leaning in favour of regulations of the sort Sechelt has had in place since 2005, especially since that would make the rules consistent in both communities.
Sechelt’s bylaw requires short-term rental operators to have a business licence and put down a refundable security deposit of $1,000 to offset any enforcement costs. They also have to list a local contact and provide that information to neighbours within a 100-metre radius of the property and post it on a sign at the entrance.
Coun. Jeremy Valeriote said he thinks while regulations are the way to go, they should be drafted with the goal of limiting short-term rentals. “I think we’re trying to unstack the deck a bit and reduce the encouragement for people to move to short-term rentals, so limiting the size, increasing the up-front fee. That kind of thing is what we’re aiming for… Let’s make it a little less attractive to kick out your long-term renters and make it an Airbnb.”
Coun. Charlene SanJenko said duplicating the Sechelt approach might not meet that goal. “It does, however, feel like [the] Sechelt [bylaw] is quite lenient, if our goal is to be very clear that if something is available for employees and longer-term rentals, that would be our preference as a council… I’m not sure that is a good starting point.”
The committee voted to have staff prepare bylaw amendments that would restrict numbers of guests a short-term rental can have, require a licence fee that’s higher than other home-based businesses, and impose stiff fines for infractions.
Rowe, in summing up council’s ideas for a potential bylaw, said: “I think there’s an appetite for a fairly substantial fine for violations, because the kind of money I’m hearing about that’s being charged here, the fine’s got to be enough to be a deterrent… There might even be an appetite for a much larger licensing fee than we might normally charge.”
