Enforcement of city codes to crack down on illegal vacation rentals on Oahu will escalate with the hiring this month of five inspectors to form a unit tasked with investigating housing and zoning code violations.

The five full-time housing-zoning code inspectors were hired on a temporary, contractual basis, city Planning Director George Atta told the City Council Zoning and Planning Committee last week.

The hires are temporary, for now, because the positions have not been approved, Atta said Thursday. The Department of Planning and Permitting intends to get approval to make the positions permanent in next year’s budget, he said.

They will bolster existing staff, which consists of 13 inspectors and one branch chief, city officials said.

The Council put $300,000 for additional inspectors in this year’s budget after concerns were raised that the city was not doing enough enforcement actions against illegal units. The move came just as the city was about to begin a new Accessory Dwelling Unit program that allows many property owners to build second dwellings on their land. The program is designed to increase Oahu’s housing stock.

The positions are being filled by retired senior inspectors already trained in the department’s inspection and enforcement procedures, which should allow them to get up to speed and in the field quickly, Atta said.

“They know what to do,” he said.

A Jan. 7 memo from Atta informed the Council it will hire six people for six months at a cost of $133,164, so the department still has one position to fill.

The department said that during 2014 and 2015 its Residential Code Enforcement Branch conduced 2,719 site visits tied to transient vacation rental investigations, resulting in 57 violation notices and 31 violation corrections.

The agency did not say how those figures compared with previous periods.

In a related development the committee voted to keep active a controversial measure that would crack down on illegal transient vacant units.

Larry Bartlett, from the group Save Oahu’s Neighborhoods, urged that Bill 22 (2015) be eventually passed.

Hiring additional inspectors is a positive development, he said, but he estimated that the city is actively investigating “100 or less” cases out of some 3,000 illegal situations. “Given the number that are out there, five more positions are still not going to do the job,” he said. “We need better, effective procedures to do the job.”

What’s needed are stricter enforcement laws such as the provision in the bill that allows for advertising of illegal vacation units as evidence, he said.

Under a new state law that took effect Jan. 1, operators of vacation rentals in Hawaii must post their transient accommodations’ tax identification numbers in online advertisements. That might also help a little, Bartlett said.

Sting operations and automating the enforcement process would also help, he said.