As short-term rentals continue to proliferate, new regulations take shape.

At 6pm on Oct. 11, about 100 people gathered at Monterey’s Crazy Horse restaurant to discuss a topic close to their wallets: short-term rentals.

The event was a quarterly meeting organized by the Monterey County Vacation Rental Alliance, and the main topic of discussion was what the laws were in varying jurisdictions, and how things have changed recently and will change in the near future.

One takeaway: The jig is up in Monterey, where a ban on short-term rentals has been in place for years, but only sporadically enforced. Since Sept. 12, the city has begun enforcing a new ordinance that prohibits advertising short-term rentals by sending cease-and-desist letters to those who do advertise, and then imposing fines, starting at $100 a day and increasing to $200 a day for continued violations. To implement the ordinance, the city hired Host Compliance, a short-term rental compliance company, which the city pays $16,000 annually to crawl the web 24 hours a day looking for illegal rentals and to produce daily reports.

Assistant City Manager Hans Uslar says it’s working: The city identified 200 illegal rentals on Aug. 22, and as of Oct. 23, that number dropped to 82.

The county, which has been in the process of updating its short-term rental ordinance for the past four years, is also churning along, albeit slowly. Current county law does not explicitly prohibit short-term rentals in the coastal zone – which is also within the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission, an agency that generally favors coastal access – but the county’s legal interpretation is that if they’re not expressly permitted, then they’re illegal.

The Monterey County Planning Commission, after discussing a draft short-term rental ordinance in several meetings earlier this year, will be presented with an updated draft Nov. 29.

Melanie Beretti, special programs manager with the county Resource Management Agency, says the draft ordinance will include all unincorporated county land except Big Sur, which will be subject to its own constraints, like workforce housing. Beretti has been convening meetings on the subject with various stakeholders since 2015, and says there are widely divergent and passionate views on the draft ordinance, but there is at least some common ground on short-term rentals, she says. “Everyone agrees if they’re going to happen, they need to be good neighbors. Nobody wants the bad actors.”

She estimates there are anywhere from 600 to 1,500 illegal rentals at any given time in the unincorporated county, and says, “In updating the regulations, one of goals is for most people to come under the legal operations’ fold.”

To that, MCVRA’s managing director Dick Matthews says members of his group are frustrated it’s taking so long. They are on edge after the county fined at least two operators $14,800 each over the summer.

Seaside is also now addressing the issue – the city doesn’t currently regulate short-term rentals – with greater speed and less resistance than the county. After two City Council sessions in which the majority of the council favored a permissive ordinance, City Manager Craig Malin will publish a draft ordinance on the city’s website Oct. 31 that will be considered by the city Planning Commission and City Council later this year.