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The Park City Staff Gets Feedback About RV Parking From The Community For Wednesday's Meeting

The Park City Planning Commission is slated to talk about proposed changes to their code for recreational vehicles, gravel and parking. Before they do, city staff wanted to know what  public what they thought and held an open house recently to get that feedback. Melissa Allison has more:

After receiving complaints from the community about where RV’s are parked in neighborhoods, the Park City Council instructed the planning staff to look at making some changes to clarify the code. They told staff  they wanted the code changes to be simple and enforceable and more importantly – they don’t want neighbors having to blow the whistle on each other.

That was about two years ago. Coming up next Tuesday, the planning staff will present the changes they call, “red lines” to the planning commission.

Last week, the city held an open house to get feedback from the public. Just a few residents attended, but they had plenty of questions.

One of the red lines says recreational vehicles such as boats, trailers and similar vehicles cannot park on residential properties from November 1 through April 1st. One woman asked if the city was only taking families with children in school into consideration, telling staff that as a retired woman, she wants more options.

“I use my recreation vehicle all the time in the winter," the woman said. "I can go to Audubon where there are no Boy Scouts or bugs in January. So, I feel like the time, April to November, seems like you’re focusing more on people who have kids in the school district. You know that’s more of the typical time that you use your recreational vehicle. But if you’re going to have a 30-day consistent parking, why have any days at all. We can’t park it in January…”

“Yeah," a man interjected. "That was my point too before the meeting.”

“…because as a senior citizen, a retired person, its awesome to go to Arches in January,” the woman finished.

One man was concerned about the enforcement of the codes. Staff responded that they’ve been working with the enforcement department but he and others in attendance wanted more detail. Planning Director Bruce Erickson stepped in.

He asked, “How is enforcement going to be dealt with in your proposal?”

“Like I said," said Planner Tippie Morlan. "Enforcement worked with us on this so we could make specific guidelines and that’s why we have a lot of numbers in these proposed codes.”

“What is the penalty?” the man asked.

“The penalty right now is the same as the penalty for parking on the streets," Erickson said. "A couple of hundred dollars a day.”

“So, complaint based?”

“No, actually code enforcement," Erickson said. "So, right now the city council’s directived its half proactive, half complaint based enforcement. So there are enforcement officers driving around. They’re doing more public outreach where they see a problem early on by driving around, they’ll try to stop having to write somebody a ticket. At the end if they have to write a ticket, they will.”

As the discussion wore on – people asked how different codes would affect them individually. One man wanted to know how the city would classify the camper on their truck.

“Lets say somebody has a pickup truck but they’ve got a camper popper tent on it or like a slide on camper deal, what they call them, does that count as an RV camper?" asked one man. "So that truck would be classified as a legal RV…?"

“Until its detached from the truck, yeah,” Morlan said.

“But if you took the hood off the pickup then its not an RV.”

“Yeah.”

“No seriously, we have…”

“The camper bed? If its less than 12 feet, right?”

“Because we’re not changing the ordinance for storage of regular vehicles and we’re not changing the ordinance for abandoned vehicles," Erickson said. "So, if you’ve covered up your precious Jaguar in your driveway, that’s probably going to go away.”

The conversation touched on topics that included the size of gravel allowed on a person’s property – two inches or less in diameter, what xeriscaping is and how visitors and locals perceive Park City.

Morlan told KPCW the comments shared at the open house will help shape their presentation to the commission.

“We want to incorporate the comments as well as we can from the meeting from the public and anyone else that still wants to make comment to us, into the red lines," Morland said. "So the red lines we had last night were a draft copy and we have been working with several departments in the city so we want to give that feedback to everyone that’s been working on it to see what we can do to address people’s concerns.”

The planning commission meets August 22 to continue the discussion.

I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.