After months of discussion, the Shawnee City Council remains in a holding pattern on whether to regulate short-term rental properties or ban them outright.
At a Shawnee City Council committee meeting on Monday, councilmembers asked city staff to explore the idea of issuing special use permits for short-term rentals, like Airbnb and VRBOs.
Since the meeting was only meant to gather feedback from the community, no vote or motion was taken by the council.
Rental property owners speak up
While previous committee meetings about short-term rentals have mostly centered on feedback from neighbors who say they have been negatively affected by Airbnbs in Shawnee, Monday’s meeting drew more short-term rental owners defending their properties.
Shannon Doser, a real estate agent who runs an Airbnb with her husband in Shawnee, said banning short-term rentals would be a mistake.
“If you ban these, what you’re saying is, ‘We don’t want you here. We’re not going to have tourism. We’re going to simply send those tourists to Lenexa and over to Overland Park,’” she said.
Megan Duma, a real estate attorney who also runs an Airbnb in Shawnee, said she invested more than $100,000 into her rental property. She said she takes pride in booking respectful guests.
“We’re hosting a lot of neighbors, families, coming into to town for funerals, for graduations. But we vet [guests] very hard,” she said.
Some neighbors still want Airbnbs banned
Shawnee resident Larry Diehl, who spoke at an Oct. 26 committee meeting about problems with a neighboring Airbnb where he said guests were loud and blocked driveways in the neighborhood, returned Monday to say the the problems were persisting.
“That following Friday night, I went home at about three in the afternoon to a group of guys hanging out in the front yard drinking beer. That just got worse and worse and worse,” he said.
Other neighbors complained about Airbnbs in neighborhoods bringing in groups of 15 people or more, crowding the streets with cars and buses and making noise.
“When the wife is afraid to be in her own home, when the kids are afraid to go outside and cry when people show up at this Airbnb, something’s got to be done,” said Bob Weber, a Shawnee resident.
Ban or regulate? Council is still deciding
While the committee thanked both sides of the arguments, its prospective solutions remain mixed.
Councilmembers like Tony Gillette are still calling for a full ban on all short-term rentals.
“I love VRBOs in the Colorado mountains, at Lake of the Ozarks or Gatlinburg [Tennessee] or Table Rock Lake,” he said. “We don’t have a lake. We don’t have a mountain. We have people who want to have homes and raise families and have children and that’s what they should expect.”
Councilmember Eric Jenkins suggested going the route of special use permits, which he said would be able to lay guidelines for how short-term rentals operate and govern them when they break rules.
“We use an [special use permit] process if you want to put childcare in your home, if you want to put a one-chair barbershop in your home or a one-chair beauty shop,” he said. “A lot of different businesses use this. To me, this is a business use in a residential neighborhood.”
There could be problems with special use permits
City attorney Jenny Smith said that to issue special use permits, there would have to be changes to Title 5 of Shawnee’s Code of Ordinances pertaining to giving out business licenses to short-term rentals and regulations.
“We would need to implement the business license regulations before we can take those away,” she said.
Community Development Director Doug Allmond said that obtaining a special use permit could be a lengthy process that would include mailing out notices to neighbors within 200 feet of the property and that permits could be challenged with a valid protest petition, which would require a seven-vote supermajority vote from city council.
“In my mind, being very honest with you, an [special use permit] process could end up being an outright ban in single-family [neighborhoods] because I think that seven-vote threshold is sometimes very difficult to obtain,” he said.
Still, city staff will explore SUPs
While the committee admitted the permit route wasn’t perfect, members like Kurt Knappen see it as a good first step.
“You could give us a [special use permit] at least as a starting point for our discussions to see where we want to go,” he said.
Following the Nov. 7 election, some of the councilmembers at Monday’s meeting — including Eric Jenkins, Tammy Thomas and Jill Chalfie — will be replaced by new councilmembers who will be seated at the council meeting on Dec. 11.
Knappen said while the new councilmembers catch up on the discussion, city staff should look into special use permits, as well as contact short-term rental companies like Airbnb and VRBO to see how they can delist short-term rentals that are a nuisance to neighbors.
“The new members that join the council the next meeting can continue to discuss this issue, and I’m you’ll come up with great answers where we’re all done,” Jenkins said.
Other Johnson County short-term rental news: Merriam latest Johnson County city to take up short-term rental issue
