Under a new proposal poised to pass, bad owners of short term rentals will get special correctional treatment if they fail to keep their guests from terrorizing our communities like they have in recent years (story HERE).

Its a bad plan. One that bows to bad property owners, while disregarding neighborhood families who just want to live their lives in peace.

The worst part of the concept is a special “correctional meeting” that bad owners will have to attend if they’re reprimanded. Its essentially a short term rental “detention” where they’ll get called into a room and have to write an “essay” or correctional plan to explain how their going to fix their bad ownership habits.

If they can’t fix their mistakes, then neighborhoods will still have to endure more steps until these nuisances are finally taken care of.

This is special treatment. Other industries in the area don’t get this kind of tolerance. It’s just clever angling by a real estate industry that pushed us right into the affordable housing crisis that many of us, including myself, are still dealing with now.

And what makes things worse still, is that all of the voices in this conversation didn’t get to participate. The only ones who had a say in this proposal are the ones who are getting rich off of owning bad short term rentals in Green Bay.

Its unfortunate, and its sad. I wish that the same kind of energy that went into granting these short term rentals special protections, could have been used over the past couple of years to help those who are struggling during these tough times.