In the late 1800s, before he began his meteoric rise to the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt served as a police commissioner in New York City. Being a progressive Republican, he managed to ruffle feathers on both sides of the aisle all throughout his career. In NYC, he enraged much of the populace by enforcing laws that limited times bars could be open and cracked down on illegal brothels to which the previous police leadership had turned a blind eye.

As for some of the laws such as the crackdown on drinking times, he said he wasn’t necessarily enforcing all of the laws because he was in favor of them, but that it was important to enforce what the law said. He noted that enforcing an unpopular law would be the best way to change the laws to work better. 

If Park County enforced the letter of the law regarding short term rentals, as county planning and zoning department staff have worked to define them, it would surely lead to many calls for new regulations. 

A question on allowing a short term rental in a neighborhood with a unique subdivision agreement last week raised the specter of short term rental regulations. Planning Director Joy Hill said after doing a deep dive on regulations recently with her staff, her determination is that any zoning regulations that refers to only a “single family residence” being allowed, is incompatible with that house being used as a short term rental, which she determined would fall under a highway commercial business, not allowed in many zoning areas. 

Hill said she doesn’t have a dog in the fight; she just painstakingly went through definitions in county policies to determine how a “single family residence” is defined. And a short term rental does not match up. 

Now, before you go to remove your Airbnb listing, know that this is her definition, not what the county commissioners have decided upon. Hill said if it was a fully enforceable definition, she estimates there’d be a couple hundred county property owners that would be deemed in violation of the regulation. 

But, she said, the commissioners don’t want that kind of enforcement. Instead, the plan is to reopen discussion on short term rentals in the county once the new county land use plan is finalized, then work on regulations. 

So, we’re almost ready to dive into that discussion again. 

In 2019, county commissioners discussed potential regulations on short term rentals before deciding to postpone any decisions until after the new land use plan was finished. Hill said that at the time, while there were people on both extremes of the issue, most people were in the middle, wanting moderate regulations. 

Hopefully that will include a settling of what a single family residence is and how a short term rental ought best to be classified. It could be the best chance we have to decide what kind of future we want for the county in terms of housing, how many short term rentals is enough, whether that should be anyone’s business but the property owner or the HOA, or whether the county should finally get involved in deciding if a short term rental is appropriate in a certain area. 

And, if we can’t decide, there’s a definition out there just waiting to be fully utilized.