Jim Thorpe Borough Council unanimously passed a short-term rental ordinance Thursday night that had been several years in the making.

The ordinance, and an accompanying zoning amendment, regulates where future short-term rentals can be located in the municipality, and lists requirements both current and future short-term rental owners need to meet.

“It feels good to get it on the books,” Council President Greg Strubinger said after the meeting. “They’ve been operating here, several hundred of them, and we really had to address it. Our ordinance didn’t address it. Since they were already operating, we opted to allow it, but regulate it.”

In May, council heard three-and-a-half hours of public comment mostly centered on where short-term rentals would be permitted to exist. At the time, the R4 and C3 zoning districts were under consideration, but that has since been expanded.

According to the proposed amendment, existing short-term rentals will be grandfathered in, in terms of location. New rentals will be restricted to the C1, C2, C3, R4 and special zoning districts and owners will need to go through the borough’s special exception process. Owners hoping to open a short-term rental outside of those zones would need to receive a variance.

“I’ve said it several times but we are a zoned community and we wanted to be sensitive to the concerns of people who live next to the rentals, while also giving STR owners the ability to continue in certain parts of the borough,” Strubinger said.

Within 90 days of ordinance adoption, any current short-term rental owner must register their business via a change-of-use application with the borough. They will also have to renew a short-term rental permit annually.

One of the major issues over the years has been parking. The advertised ordinance requires short-term rental owners to provide one parking space per bedroom in the unit they are renting.

A permit revocation for a first violation of the ordinance will be three months. A second violation within three years of the first conviction will result in a one-year permit suspension. A third violation within three years of the first violation is cause for a permanent revocation of the permit, according to the ordinance.

“It has some teeth and it holds people responsible,” Strubinger said. “There is a mechanism in there that someone could lose their license so we hope that encourages everyone to comply with the ordinance.”