CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A series of complaints led the city of Chattanooga to change the rules surrounding short term vacation rentals (STVRs).
Now, some of those owners are upset to learn they are facing fines. However, the city admits not all of them were accurate.
The City of Chattanooga released the first 30 names and addresses of those they say are operating Airbnb homes without a permit.
But they say there were some mistakes caught by the city after the fact, and a few of those names aren’t accurate.
Like this home in the photo. According to the owner, they were cited incorrectly and their name should have never been on the list.
And he’s not the only one saying it’s a mistake.
One by one Wednesday we started calling those on the list of 30 names released by the city.
They are the first batch of over 250 STVR owners that could potentially be cited for operating their Airbnbs without a proper permit.
We spoke to 3 owners on the list. Some say they are furious their information was released without any notice, and they have been legally operating their Airbnb rentals.
We took those concerns to Kevin Roig with the mayor’s office.
He says, “There were some mistakes the city caught after the fact, attributable to the new software’s integration with the current. Frontline folks are resolving it so that it doesn’t happen again.”
Chris Anderson with the city says they are using new software to help identify unpermitted STVRs as part of enforcing the updated regulations.
He says the discrepancy resulted from an “imperfect integration of the multiple databases used to source the list.”
“The decision to only pull a subset of addresses as a test case was intentional, given the new software and in anticipation of the possibility for error; we wanted to minimize the impact of any discrepancies, and that proved to be a prudent approach,” says Anderson.
Anderson says approximately one-third of this list of 30 addresses were incorrectly identified as unpermitted.
“The root cause of the error was quickly identified by working with our software provider and a process has been put in place today to ensure the relational datasets are synchronized moving forward. It’s unfortunate that the list was made public, but it was only done so because we responded to a request from a local media outlet for what state law considers a public document. We are proactively reaching out to the errantly-cited property owners to notify them of the mistake, to explain the cause and the fix, and to apologize for the inconvenience. We do not anticipate this issue to recur,” says Anderson.
But that answer wasn’t good enough for Brad Wardlaw, the Director for the Greater Chattanooga Coalition for Private Property Rights, who calls the ordinance “a direct violation of our constitutional rights.”
He says, “Publishing names and addresses of operators before they have been given a chance to respond to the citation is downright disgraceful.”
One STVR owner says they are disappointed with their name “recklessly” being placed on the list.
They say the city sent them an emailing saying it was a mistake.
Warshaw says his organization already filed a lawsuit against the city that will be heard by a federal judge in the near future.