Borough council members in Jim Thorpe continued debate Thursday night on how far a proposed rental inspection program should go — and how much oversight landlords should expect if the municipality moves forward.

The proposed ordinance would require regular inspections of rental units throughout the borough to ensure safety and code compliance.

“We’re clearly not ready to do something like this,” Councilman Tom Chapman said Thursday regarding the proposal.

Borough Manager Maureen Sterner told council she had received feedback from the borough’s building code official, who reviewed the planning commission’s proposed list of inspection items.

“It is marked which are zoning ordinance items, which are property maintenance and which are building codes,” Sterner said.

Sterner said the borough must first decide who would conduct the inspections and what items should be included.

“We can’t determine a price for an inspection until we know who is going to be doing it,” she said.

The planning commission’s draft checklist covers dozens of possible inspection points, from smoke detectors and handrails to structural soundness and chimney liners. Council members debated Thursday whether the list should focus only on basic life-safety items or include more technical building code requirements.

Sterner noted that the borough’s property maintenance code hasn’t been updated in nearly 20 years and suggested adding language to automatically adopt future state updates so the borough does not fall behind again.

Planning Commission member James Dougher said the proposed checklist was meant to be simple and safety-focused.

“This was not meant to be something complicated,” he said. “The intent was just to be a quick line of sight — can you get out of the house safely, quickly? Or is the access blocked by certain things? This is not meant to be a detailed structural analysis of the house or to require homeowners to make a lot of updates.”

Council members appeared to agree that the focus should remain on basic safety.

“Just focus on safety railings, egress, steps and clutter — simple things that deal with life safety,” Chapman said.

Sterner said the borough could consider having Bureau Veritas, which handles other inspections for the borough, take on the rental program.

“Other places do it, and it depends on each jurisdiction,” she said.

She said the borough is “not looking to charge a whole lot of money for this” and hopes inspections could be kept short.

The borough has an estimated 64 short-term rentals currently registered, Sterner said, and there are likely many more long-term rentals.

“You figure if your inspector is going to take two hours,” he said. “You don’t want to make it a long inspection. It’s going to be a three-hour inspection for each one because you have one building across from three others. I believe there’s four apartments in that one building.”

Councilman Mike Yeastedt said any program would require significant effort and cooperation from landlords.

“I doubt that everybody has smoke detectors everywhere that’s required, or carbon monoxide,” Yeastedt said. “I doubt that everybody in older homes has GFI outlets installed where required. So there will be things to properly upgrade.”

Thursday’s discussion ended with each council member tasked with reviewing the list and highlighting the items they believe should remain.