Members of a new town committee working to write by-laws regulating short term rentals (STRs) in town didn’t have a huge crowd at their second meeting earlier this month, but heard enough from the three residents attending to give them pause.

“There were times it got a little heated,” Westport Town Planner Michael Burris told members of the planning board last week. “Their main concern was that the draft framework was too restrictive.“

A draft form of the by-laws released last month governs nearly every aspect of STRs and how the town would regulate them if approved by the select board and then by voters at next year’s Town Meeting.

Though Burris said that while comments touched on many areas of the draft by-law, his sense was that “with a use like a short term rental unit, the more requirements that you start to put on that use, the more difficult it will be to try to get people to try to even get their foot in the door and come into compliance. If you issue someone a citation and they say ‘I took it down,’ in a couple of weeks they put it right back up. So you start the cycle all over again.”

Though as currently written the draft by-laws require a host of approvals and inspections, as well as fees, Burris suggested it could be stream-lined:

“We want the process to not be really burdensome, with having to go to a bunch of different departments” for approvals, he said.

“Getting an inspection from the Board of Health, fire department, building inspector ... those are a lot of hoops for people to have to jump through for something that is really not that intensive of a use.”

“I think the sentiments they expressed ... I’ve heard before and I think they’re more prevalent than one might expect,” planning board member Mark Schmid, who also serves as a member of the Short Term Rental Committee, added.

“If you’re going to get people to comply” with the eventual by-laws, “we have to be careful to not overdo it,” he said.

One of the residents mentioned buying a house many years before moving here full time, and renting it out in the short ad long term over the years until he was ready to move in, Schmid said.

“For some people that’s kind of the critical difference of being able to keep your house. So those feelings, and sort of the overall feeling of people — (they) don’t want to see an enormous amount of regulation.”

Planning board member John Bullard said that while he agrees that regulations need to fit the lay of the land and not be onerous, he has little patience for those who complain that regulations could bring with them town fees and other expenses.

“They’re making money and they don’t mind paying the realtor a fee, or they don’t mind paying AirBnB a fee, but, ‘Oh, the town’s going to charge a fee? Oh, that’s horrible!’ Right? They’ll pay a fee to anybody else, the cleaning service, whoever else, that’s OK, the cost of doing business. But the town shouldn’t? You learn an awful lot from three people.”

However, he said he expects the regulations will become more tuned in as the town receives more and more feedback on them.

The short term rental committee’s next meeting is set for Thursday, Oct. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Town Hall Annex.