The city of Bend is trapped in slow motion on vacation rentals. There’s no question that city staff want to do something to protect neighborhoods and protect the rights of rental owners. There’s also no question that the city is doing something about it.

The Bend City Council is scheduled to approve tonight a task force of 23 Bend residents on the subject. The Bend Planning Commission will be holding meetings. And the city’s plan is to have regulatory options for the council to consider in the spring before the summer tourist season.

City staff has called the plan an “ambitious” schedule of meetings and “a deep dive” into the subject. But if it’s going to be spring before the council even has options to consider, many new applications are going to be approved under the liberal requirements of the existing rules.

Already the city has new applications for vacation rentals from people who apparently fear the new regulations. From Sept. 17 (which is when staff made a presentation to the council on vacation rentals) through Nov. 4, the city received 81 new applications for vacation rentals. Of those, 29 were submitted after letters were sent out from the city, suggesting that a property needs a permit. The city says 52 were new applications. More updated numbers will likely be available this week.

The city did the right thing by not approving an outright moratorium on new applications until it could consider new regulations. A moratorium like that is ripe for a lawsuit. The city also did the right thing to ramp up its pursuit of regulatory options.

One problem with vacation rentals is that too many concentrated in a neighborhood erodes a neighborhood’s neighborliness. That problem is just getting worse as the months tick away.