Did you hear that sigh in Oneonta?

It came as it does every year just after the students from our local colleges head out of town for the summer.

But, as we learned from "As Time Goes By," that wonderful song from "Casablanca," sometimes, "a sigh is just a sigh."

It’s not that we don’t love the kids who contribute so much money to the local economy. We do; truly we do.

It’s just that through the years, residents here have kind of gotten used to a couple of months of being able to park their cars in front of their own houses.

They’ve enjoyed a respite from having to listen to the sounds of raucous partying at all hours. A little less traffic going downtown or to the Southside isn’t hard to take, either.

But those halcyon days of placid summers are no more, as the college students have been replaced by an annual influx of attendees of local youth baseball camps and their families.

The city has basically been caught flat-footed by the practice of area home-owners renting their houses by the week to those families.

Cooperstown All-Star Village, Cooperstown Baseball World and Cooperstown Dreams Park have turned into big business for our area, and that is a very good thing for the local economy.

After watching Junior’s team play, Mom, Dad and Sis have to eat somewhere. They have to buy gas and other necessities ... and they have to live somewhere.

This year, 29 enterprising locals will be making a tidy profit by renting their homes to those folks who prefer a house to a motel room.

That’s all well and good, unless you happen to live on the same block as someone who is renting to strangers.

Concerns raised about summer rentals include a negative impact on year-round neighborhoods, fire safety, traffic and depletion of housing opportunities for year-round residents.

That’s why we are encouraged by the announcement last week by the city of Oneonta that it is forming an ad hoc panel of residents, landlords and officials.

The idea is for this group to help oversee the effectiveness of the city’s summer-rental ordinance and smooth over conflicts.

The city’s Intergovernmental Affairs Committee is revising Ordinance No. 7 of 2006, which hasn’t really gotten in the way of anybody who wanted to use his house for short-term summer rentals.

We hope this ad hoc committee will help put some teeth into a revised version of the ordinance. Mayor John Nader says he expects it will have stricter requirements. Almost anything would be better than the city’s current impotence in regulating what should be a cottage industry in which residents’ concerns carry some weight.

If the city can get a handle on this situation, the next sigh you hear will be one of contentment.