Councillors in Gibsons are going back to the drawing board, again, on short-term rentals.
Council put a draft bylaw on hold after a public hearing so the results of a recent housing needs assessment could be considered.
The bylaw was back before the planning and development committee Nov. 3, where several possible changes were proposed.
Coun. David Croal said council should address the principal objection to the bylaw raised at the public hearing: the requirement for a short-term rental host to be on the property during a guest stay.
“The ball’s squarely back in our court after the last public hearing and it seems that the largest opposition to the proposed bylaw was how we deal with short-term rentals that are not host-operated or the host isn’t present on the site,” he said. “I’m looking for some common ground.”
He suggested a requirement that STR owners be residents of Gibsons who “can respond in a reasonable time” if there’s ever an issue.
“If someone’s managing five or 10 properties and they’re all over the community and they don’t even live in the community, there’s a bigger problem there.”
Coun. Stafford Lumley said he agreed with that idea.
“I don’t think people that live in Vancouver or West Vancouver should be speculating in real estate and paying for the mortgages with vacation STRs – I don’t think that’s a good formula for the town,” he said. “I think the people that own them should be residents of Gibsons and then the money would come back into the community.”
Lumley also proposed restricting the number of STRs any one person can own.
Coun. Aleria Ladwig said an operator-on-site rule makes sense in residential areas. “People that buy up residential property for the sole purpose of running a commercial venture is a misuse of the residential zone.”
But, she said an exception should be made in commercial zones and gave the example raised in the first public hearing of the owners of Beachcomber Coffee who were offering the suite above the coffee shop as an STR.
Coun. Annemarie De Andrade also suggested an exception for people who own and use vacation homes in Gibsons to allow them to have 60 un-hosted rental nights a year.
“What we need to remember, the purpose of this bylaw is to increase housing availability,” she said. “For the people who have vacation homes, they are not going to rent [long term] because they come here and have family that comes.”
Lumley said it could be difficult to enforce. “It opens the door for anybody off Coast to purchase a home and say this is my vacation home, but run it as an STR with no intention of ever using it as a vacation home.”
The committee voted to have staff bring forward a report on amending the bylaw to allow un-hosted short-term rentals if they meet certain criteria, including having an owner that is a resident of Gibsons and putting a 60-day cap on the number of un-hosted rental nights.
The committee also asked for revisions that would limit an owner to only one un-hosted STR property and allow STRs in suites in commercial properties in the “lower historic village.”
The committee didn’t give a time frame for getting the report, but Croal said he would like to see a revised bylaw go forward to public hearing “before we’re into another tourist season.”
