Sarnia council believes there should be a public process when it comes to establishing short-term rentals in the city.
Council voted 6-3 in favour of directing staff to request that the short-term accommodation zoning bylaw be advanced to a hearing through the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT), an independent administrative tribunal responsible for hearing appeals on a variety of contentious municipal matters.
The results were announced Monday following a special meeting that was closed to the public.
Mayor Mike Bradley thinks council took the right step.
"It will ensure there's public process to the future as it relates to short-term rentals. And there was a proposed settlement which would've bypassed the public process, it would've allowed these operations to pop up in at least 12 different locations without any public process. The majority of council could just not accept that."
Bradley said the idea that the city would allow these short-term accommodations to pop up without any notification to the neighbours and their neighbourhoods is just totally unacceptable.
"So a number of councillors, and legitimately so, had some questions on that direction, and council looked at all the facts and information and came back and said 'no, we're going to ratify our previous position,' which is there has to be more public process, there has to be public dialogue."
Bradley said there could be a hearing later this year or early into next year.
"There's a lot of significant issues involved in this, as it also involves who knows about the operations of these places, how will they be controlled, it's a very complicated issue. But council said we want this to have a public process, and that to me is the bottom line and that's the fair thing to do."
Councillors Margaret Bird, Brian White and Nathan Colquhoun voted against the motion.
In March 2020, council passed a bylaw regulating short term rentals, like Airbnbs.