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Marco Island’s Short-term Rental Committee almost seemed to be at square one Thursday evening.

The group did not altogether scrap plans to require registration for vacation rental properties, but the committee danced around that possibility.

Five meetings into their mission – and two after voting to compel rental owners to register with the city – the group questioned whether it would be better off simply creating a nuisance ordinance that allows city Code Compliance officers to pursue and punish repeat offenders.

As it is, said Code Compliance Chief Eric Wardle, the most common problems with short-term rental properties are noise, trash, parking and boat trailer violations.

“Don’t register for the sake of registering,” Wardle warned.

The identity crisis came for the group after two hours of discussing a draft ordinance governing registered rental properties. It was also the second meeting at which the committee has examined the draft.

“We’ve got ordinances on the books that are not being enforced as it is,” said committee member George Percel. “I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel and create ordinances that aren’t on the books.” The committee, which has a goal to wrap up their objectives by the end of the next meeting April 30, has yet to discuss an alternate proposal drafted by former Police Chief Roger Reinke. Reinke’s official last day was April 18.

Reinke’s proposal included creation of a nuisance property ordinance, which would allow the city to impose tiered fines based on the number of code violations observed. For an ordinance like that to make sense, however, the committee discussed the need for noise and other ordinances to have more teeth, or to be more enforceable.

As it stands, a police or code officer must observe a violation in order to hand out a citation or a notice of violation. With matters of city code, such as letting garbage cans sit on the street for too long, the owner of the property receives a notice of violation before receiving any penalties. If the offending property owner comes into compliance within a given period of time, they typically never see the city’s code enforcement board and face no fines.

Committee members spent the first part of the meeting wrangling with the language in the draft ordinance regarding punishments, going back and forth over whether the owner or the tenant should be cited for a code or other non-criminal violation.

“Even if they did find (tenants) doing something, they give them a notice to appear 30 days later and they never see (the tenant) again,” committee member Karen Salvi said. “No one is going to go after someone in another state for a noise violation.” At the meeting’s end, Community Development Director Steve Olmsted took on the task of examining current ordinances, determining their penalties and figuring out how the committee could take a “multi-pronged approach” to curtailing the problems some residents say have plagued their single-family neighborhoods.

“Revolving door” is a term often attributed to short-term rental homes by neighboring residents who say a new cast of rowdy and rude characters arrive next door each week.

The committee is also hoping to get City Attorney Alan Gabriel in on the last session to answer a few legal questions, chief among them, what obligations and liabilities the city would have if it were to start registering rental properties. Some committee members have brought up concerns of the considerable cost of fire inspections for the properties, which state statutes require for all rental properties registered with the state of Florida.

The final meeting of the Short-term Rental Housing Committee is scheduled for 6 p.m., April 30, in the community room of the Marco Island Police Department. Any ordinances or laws drafted by the committee will go before City Council for approval. Original plans called for the committee’s recommendations to be vetted before the Planning Board first, but the proposal may go straight to the council instead.