KINGSTON — A group of local Airbnb hosts are calling out the city for a “flawed” and “opaque” process leading up to new regulations for the short-term rental sector.

City council is expected to receive the draft bylaw at its first meeting in December, the result of more than 18 months of staff work.

The city declined to discuss the details of the draft bylaw as it is still a work in progress, but some of the measures being considered include rules that would limit short-term rentals to 30 consecutive says, cap how often a residence can be rented to 180 days a year, limit to four the number of guests who can stay at a single rental unit, and require hosts to pay a four per cent mandatory accommodation tax.

But members of a group of more than 40 Airbnb hosts said they have been largely left out of the conversation about the proposed rules.

“It’s a flawed process because we have a lot of understanding of these issues,” Airbnb host Ron Hartling said. “Since they haven’t consulted with us, they are trying to regulate an industry without any information about what that industry is all about.”

Airbnb host Simon Andrew said many of the proposed regulations are based on inaccurate information and “populist preconceptions” about who owns short-term rentals and who rents them.

“I think one perceives that Airbnb-ers are these fat cats who get money for free,” Andrew said. “I would say 99 per cent of people don’t Airbnb out of choice. They Airbnb out of necessity. People do it to get by.”

“It’s not at the medium income level,” Hartling added. “It’s people who have homes and need income to keep their homes or are beyond the age in today’s economy where you can go out and get another job.”

There are about 310 Airbnb properties in Kingston, about one-third of which are rooms, one-third are suites and about one-quarter are separate houses or cottages, Hartling said.

About two-thirds of the local hosts are “Superhosts,” the company’s highest rating based on customer reviews, he added.

Restrictive regulations on the short-term rental sector would prevent people from earning income from their homes, income that could allow some to stay in their homes.

“It would cut our income probably in half,” Airbnb host Heather Ramsay said. “It would definitely, severely impact us.”

Ramsay’s husband, John Vallis, said the regulations, at least what is publicly known about them, would hurt the city’s tourism industry, too.

“We are ambassadors for the city and we bring in thousands of tourists to Kingston,” Vallis said. “We’ve had guests say that if they had to stay in a hotel at their rates they couldn’t do it.”

Kyle Compeau, the city’s acting manager of licensing and enforcement, said the upcoming bylaw is to include input from the public and stakeholders, including hosts.

The issue was the subject of two online surveys and open houses in the past two years.

“We are still open to public engagement. We are meeting with Airbnb hosts, we are meeting with short-term renters, we are trying to gauge the public feedback in regards to that,” he said. “We are taking everybody’s feedback and putting that into the report.

“A lot of this is new to a lot of municipalities.”