key-2114044_1920
By David Walsh

By LANDON WOODROOF

State legislation that would take away local governments’ ability to ban short-term rentals was reintroduced on Capitol Hill in Nashville on Tuesday, although action on the bill was deferred.

The legislation, SB1086, was set to appear before the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee meeting at 1:30 p.m.. However, Sen. Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, chair of the committee, announced at the beginning of the meeting that action on the bill had been rolled, or deferred, to a future date.

SB1086’s Tennessee House of Representatives counterpart is HB1020. It passed the House on first consideration on May 8, 2017. The vote was 53 ayes and 35 nays. State representatives covering parts of Brentwood, Rep. Glen Casada, R-Franklin, and Charles Sargent, R-Franklin, both voted against the bill.

By the time it passed the House, HB1020 pertained only to the city of Nashville. This year’s version of SB1086 would cover the whole state.

The final content of SB1086, though, is yet to be determined.

“It’s kind of changing all the time honestly,” Tucker Karnes, a legislative aide to Sen. John Stevens, R-Huntingdon, said. Stevens is the senate sponsor of SB1086.

Karnes said that discussions about the legislation have been ongoing, both with various industry stakeholders and with others. One of the goals is to come up with compromises that will satisfy affected municipalities.

Karnes provided a copy of the latest amended version of SB1086, or the “Short-Term Rental Unit Act.” 

The bill lays out certain ways in which municipalities can regulate short-term rentals. However, under the terms of the bill, municipalities are still prohibited from banning them altogether, as the City of Brentwood does.

For instance, SB1086 stipulates that municipalities can prohibit the “use of a short-term rental unit to promote activities that are illegal under generally applicable local law.” They can also ban short-term rentals of less than 24 hours in duration or those offered by felons or registered sex offenders.

Municipalities can also require short-term rental providers to register their units annually and to carry a minimum of $1 million in both property and liability insurance.

The bill would also allow municipalities to place certain limitations on non-owner occupied short-term rentals. These are the types of rentals that Nashville’s Metro Council recently voted to gradually prohibit from residential neighborhoods.

The bill allows municipalities to limit the number of non-owner-occupied units it can have in an area, but, again, municipalities cannot ban non-owner-occupied rentals outright.

Homeowners associations could still ban short-term rentals under the terms of the bill.

The City of Brentwood recently announced that it was again planning to oppose any legislation that would limit its ability to set its own policies concerning short-term rentals.

“The fundamental issue here is an effort by one commercial industry to get the legislature to provide it with a state-wide exception to every locally adopted zoning ordinance,” City Manager Kirk Bednar said in a news release. “The state has left these type of land use decisions to local governments for over eighty years because local officials’ best represent the wishes of their communities. If this effort is successful, it will set a very dangerous precedent and open the door for any other commercial enterprise to look to the legislature for similar ‘one-size fits all’ land use exemptions.”

SB1086 had been advanced out of Sen. Johnson’s committee last year, but only after it had been stripped of the language superseding local control of short-term rental regulations.

Advocates of the bill at the time had described it as standing up for individual property rights.

“Instead of elected officials sitting here deciding what’s best for your property, we put some reasonable regulation in place and allow a marketplace to develop,” Sen. Stevens said at a March 14, 2017 meeting. “As issues come up, we can step in where needed, but not a top-down approach where elected officials are really trying to determine what’s best for our own property.”

Johnson had responded by appealing to the property rights of homeowners living nearby short-term rental units.

“What about my private property rights?” he asked. “When I bought a home in a neighborhood, I did not plan on having a vacation entity or rental next door to me. And I don’t know from week to week who’s gonna be my next-door neighbor.”

The Tennessee General Assembly website states that SB1086 has been deferred to the Feb. 27 meeting of the Senate Commerce & Labor Committee.