LAFAYETTE, La. (KLFY)– With the Lafayette City Council possibly prohibiting short term rentals, members of the Home Hosting Alliance are voicing their concerns over why short term rentals should not be banned

Organizer Mike Bass said the group was created as a way to give people information on why short term rentals are needed.

“We asked them [The Lafayette City Council] to put together a task force to study the history of short term rentals,” Bass said. “Instead of doing that, they said why don’t you guys go talk to people, do research, bring us back information. So, that’s what we’ve been working on the last couple of weeks, and today we issued our second report.”

Bass said banning short term rentals is too extreme and the group has been trying to prevent it. 

“We think it’s too far,” Bass said. “Lafayette has never had any rules, any regulations for short term rentals. We’ve been trying to speak out against that.”

Paz Raaz, the homeowner of the guesthouse treehouse where they had the meeting, said she did some research on the ban and saw that not many people agreed with it.

“I kept trying to look deeper to figure out why a ban would be a solution,” Raaz said. “I looked at it from a lot of different angles and the deeper I looked, there seemed to be so few people who feel that way.”

Betsy Richard, a member of the alliance, said people should not talk about short term rentals in a negative way.

“I think people hear things that aren’t true, and they’re concerned about things that won’t happen,” Richard said. “The things they talk about that could happen could happen in anybody’s owned home, any rental or any short term rental.”

Wallace Senegal, a member of the alliance, said while no decision has been made yet, he hopes the council will rethink banning short term rentals.

“It’s up in the air,” Senegal said. “Hopefully the people that wanna ban short term rentals come to an agreement.”

The Lafayette City Council has not voted on an official ban of short term rentals, but the Home Hosting Alliance said they will continue to do what they can to prevent this from happening.