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Law360 (April 8, 2020, 6:13 PM EDT ) Owners of short-term rental units could face enforcement action if they continue to advertise properties for rent on sites run by Airbnb Inc. and Expedia Group in violation of a statewide order shutting down non-life sustaining businesses over the COVID-19 outbreak, officials in Pennsylvania warned on Tuesday.
Community and Economic Development Secretary Dennis Davin urged Airbnb and Expedia in a pair of letters to take stronger measures to inform homeowners and landlords that they should not be advertising properties on the companies' websites.
"Such actions undermine ongoing virus mitigation efforts by state and federal agencies, unnecessarily putting the health of the public in even greater jeopardy than is already the case," Davin said of the ongoing rental postings. "We are hoping to achieve voluntary compliance, and wish to avoid enforcement action by the commonwealth that would cause significant consequences for the offenders."
Gov. Tom Wolf signed an order on March 19 requiring certain designated "non-life sustaining" businesses to indefinitely cease operations at their physical locations in an attempt to prevent continued person-to-person spread of the novel coronavirus.
The governor's initial order was supplemented the following day with additional guidance as to which businesses counted as "life-sustaining," and the state went on to accept petitions from individual businesses seeking waiver from the shutdown mandate.
The orders have prompted a series of legal challenges, at least one of which has already been rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and GOP lawmakers have raised objections to Wolf's wholesale approach to shutting down businesses.
But lawmakers in the Poconos have said that, despite the order, they had seen rental companies advertising "coronavirus-free" properties specifically to residents of New York and New Jersey, where numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases have generally been higher.
"They are coming here, they're spreading more germs and they are taking more germs back with them," Rep. Maureen Madden, D-Monroe, said in an April 1 statement.
The complaints from local lawmakers prompted Wolf last week to specifically classify short-term rentals as nonessential businesses.
But despite Wolf's actions, Davin said in his letter Tuesday, homeowners and landlords had continued to advertise properties on Airbnb, the Expedia-owned Vrbo and other websites.
Representatives for Airbnb and Expedia did not immediately return messages seeking comment on Wednesday.
--Editing by Daniel King.
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