The Village of Fair Haven has rewritten the rulebook for renting out a house by the weekend, and the document runs to sixteen sections covering everything from fire extinguisher placement to bonfire supervision. What it does not do, at least not yet, is tell anyone how many short-term rentals the village will allow in the end.

Village of Fair Haven Local Law No. 1 of 2026, titled “A Local Law Amending And Restating Local Law No. 1 of 2025,” was finalized in an introductory draft dated April 29, 2026. The Board of Trustees took it up at a special meeting on May 26, 2026, at Village Hall on Cayuga Street, an agenda that also called for completing the village’s environmental review under the state Environmental Quality Review Act before enactment. By June 22, the village’s own posted notice shows, the office began accepting short-term rental permit applications under the amended law.

The rewrite replaces Local Law No. 1 of 2025, the village’s first attempt at regulating short-term rentals, which took effect March 25, 2025. That original law came with an amnesty clause: anyone who had run a rental for at least six months before it passed could keep operating while applying for a permit. The 2026 version drops that grandfathering path entirely. Every applicant, new or existing, now starts from the same set of rules once a permit comes up for renewal.

The numbers behind the rewrite come from the law’s own legislative findings, and they are specific. Fair Haven counts roughly 580 single-family dwellings within the village, a mix of full-year and seasonal homes. About 292 of those sit on the waterfront of Little Sodus Bay. When the 2025 law first opened for applications, the village received 33 requests for short-term rental permits. By January 1, 2026, it had issued 32 of them, a figure the law itself calculates at approximately 5.5 percent of the village’s single-family housing stock. Nineteen of those 32 permits belong to waterfront properties on Little Sodus Bay, which the law figures at about 6.5 percent of the village’s 292 waterfront homes.

Those figures did not come from nowhere. The law’s legislative findings cite a short-term rental analysis performed by the Cayuga County Department of Planning and Economic Development, which compared Fair Haven’s rental density against single-family home counts in similar Lake Ontario and Finger Lakes waterfront communities. The Board of Trustees used that comparison, along with a year of its own permitting experience, to decide what needed to change.

The trustees had floated something bigger. Section IV of the law states plainly that the village “initially considered setting a ‘cap’ on the number of un-hosted STR permits,” the category covering whole-house rentals with no owner on site. Instead of adopting a hard number, the board voted to suspend any such cap “for a period through and including May 1, 2027, at which time a re-review of this law will occur and limits to the number of Short Term Rentals may be established.” For now, the ceiling that exists applies to individuals, not the village as a whole: Section VII bars any one person, or any single member of an LLC, partnership or corporation, from holding more than three short-term rental permits at a time.

The law does draw one hard geographic line. No new unhosted rental permits will be issued for any property with direct frontage on Main Street inside the village’s Central Business Zoning District, a restriction the trustees wrote in specifically to keep ground-floor commercial space in commercial use rather than converting to overnight lodging.

Hosted rentals, where the owner lives on the property and rents out a room or portion of the house, face a separate set of conditions. A host must document the property as a primary residence for at least seven months of the year, must be physically present in the home every night a guest is staying there, and must keep at least one bedroom for personal use. Hosted rentals are capped at half of a home’s code-compliant bedrooms, or two bedrooms, whichever is smaller. Unhosted rentals, whole homes rented with nobody living there, are barred entirely from two-family and multi-family buildings; only single-family dwellings qualify.

Permits now run for two years rather than one. Renewal applications must be filed between two and four months before the current permit expires, and every renewal triggers a fresh inspection by the village’s code enforcement officer to confirm the property still meets the law’s standards, from smoke detectors in every sleeping area to a fire extinguisher rated 2A:10BC on each floor. Owners also have to carry at least $500,000 in liability and personal injury coverage per occurrence, either through a rental platform’s own policy, a rider on a homeowner’s policy, or a standalone commercial policy.

The cost of applying stayed modest even as the compliance list grew. The Village Clerk’s office charges $50 for an application and inspection, whether the applicant is renewing or applying fresh. The permit issuance fee, due only after a property passes inspection, scales with size and hosting status: $50 for a hosted rental with one bedroom, $100 for a hosted rental with two or more, and a ladder for unhosted rentals running from $150 for one or two bedrooms up to $450 for seven or more. By CNY Signal’s calculation, the top unhosted fee is nine times the bottom hosted fee, a structure that puts the largest whole-house operations well above what a homeowner renting a spare room pays.

Enforcement carries more weight than the fee schedule suggests. A property owner convicted of running a short-term rental without a valid permit, or with one that has been suspended or revoked, faces a fine of $500 per day or twice the unit’s advertised daily rental rate, whichever is greater. Owners who keep operating after two certified-mail violation notices become ineligible to apply for any new short-term rental permit for two years. Guests cannot occupy a property at all while a suspension or revocation appeal is pending before the Zoning Board of Appeals.

The law also reaches into what happens inside the rental during a stay. Required house rules, which owners must post near the entrance and publish on any listing, have to spell out quiet hours of 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Fireworks are prohibited outright. Bonfires are allowed only in a contained fire pit or ring, never unattended, and only outside the state’s annual “no burn” window of March 15 through May 15. Tent camping does not raise a property’s approved occupancy limit; anyone sleeping in a tent still counts against the cap set by the code enforcement officer.

Those quiet-hour rules for individual rental properties will soon sit alongside a broader village conversation about noise. The Fair Haven Planning Board has scheduled an informal community workshop for Tuesday, August 18, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the Village Fire Hall, described on the village’s posted notice as a listening session to gather input on the village’s general Noise Ordinance, Chapter 96 of the village code. The notice specifies no formal action will be taken at the session; any recommendations would go to the Board of Trustees separately. The workshop lands 57 days after short-term rental applications opened under the new law, a gap CNY Signal calculated from the two dates the village itself posted.

What the amended law leaves unresolved is the question that started the whole rewrite: how many short-term rentals is too many for a village of roughly 580 homes. The Board of Trustees gave itself until May 1, 2027, just under a year from the special meeting that took up the revised law, to decide. Until then, the only ceiling in Fair Haven is a personal one, three permits per owner, and the geographic freeze on new whole-house rentals along Main Street. Every other lever, including whether the number of short-term rentals in the village keeps climbing past 32, is on hold for the trustees’ next review.

Sources and verification

This story is based on the Village of Fair Haven’s Local Law No. 1 of 2026 (introductory draft dated April 29, 2026), the village’s 2026 Short-Term Rental Process and Fee Schedule, the village’s 2026 Short-Term Rental Application, a Cayuga County calendar notice for the Board of Trustees’ May 26, 2026 special meeting, and the Village of Fair Haven’s official municipal page listing the June 22, 2026 permit acceptance date and the August 18, 2026 Planning Board noise ordinance workshop. Full citations and links appear in Section 5 below.