The Park City Planning Commission was scheduled to talk about Recreational Vehicles and where they can legally park at Wednesday’s meeting but after getting more public input on the issue, decided to continue it to the September 12th meeting. Melissa Allison has more:
The planning staff is slated to give city council a recommendation for changes to the Land Management Code regarding how, where and when residents can park their RV’s at the September 27th meeting.
Before they do that, staff wanted to hear from the public and hosted an open house on August 7th.
Because of the feedback from that meeting, the planning staff is reworking the recommendations for council.
The staff was proposing to change the code that forbids RVs to be parked at a property. A stay to the code instituted last year currently allows an RV to be parked at a home between November 1 and May 1 but, only for 30 days at a time.
But then they heard from a retired resident who travels in the off-season and wants to access her RV outside that May to November window.
Planning Director Bruce Erickson said its sounds easy enough, but it’s all in the details.
“We’re trying to make sure it’s done right," Erickson said. "It’s somewhere between telling your kids to clean their room and Obama Care in terms of how the regulations work so, we’re still trying to sort it out. We had an open house a couple of weeks ago, we had some comments from those folks, we’re trying to adapt those comments into it.”
Part of the challenge, Erickson said, is defining exactly what an RV is.
“We’re working on some size restrictions, we’re working on motorized versus non-motorized vehicles, we’re working on a couple of things," Erickson said. "But the basic strategy is this, is that recreational vehicles whatever they are, probably don’t want to be parked in the right-of-way for very long because that interferes with snow removal, it interferes with stormwater , it interferes with your neighbors rights to park on the street as well.”
The city council directed staff to be a little bit more liberal than the current code provides for and Erickson said they have two objectives now.
“Objective one is to minimize the impact of the human environment on the natural environment, which means reduced parking," Erickson said. "And second, protect the neighborhoods. And there’s a promise out there that we talk about a lot and the first promise is, when you look at moving to a neighborhood, all your neighbors roughly made a promise to keep their yards nice and it all looks nice and you want to buy the house and that’s the promise that they made. The reverse of that metal is, you also made a promise to that neighborhood. And if you’re parking recreational vehicles or commercial vehicles or snow plows or landscaping in the neighborhood, you’re detracting from that promise you made to your neighbors and there’s a whole bunch of personal responsibility in that beyond just what our regulations can do.”
The biggest issue now, Erickson said, is the 30-day rule the community suggested.
“How do you count the 30 days?" Erickson askeed. "What constitutes a movement? We’ve had some really bad actors up on Woodside Ave. get parking passes for residential parking and then parking their RV up there for several days at a time and then moving it to the other side of the street. Parking in the wrong direction, no shortage of just unfortunate behavior.”
The current limit for an RV to be parked off-street is 30 days. The code for parking on the street however is 72 hours and Erickson says that won’t change.
“We’d like to drop the 72 hours back but if you’ve got kids and you want to load up the RV and you want to take care of the dog or whatever, a couple three days probably isn’t a problem," Erickson said. "And the issue there is if you have a 43 or 44-footer, you’re taking up two parking spaces of the public property, not just one. And then two, we’ve done a study that gives us the average distance between driveways and that’s running at about 40 to 50 feet. So if you’re parking a 40-foot RV, your neighbors can’t see to back out of the driveways.”
Erickson expects the council will deregulate RVs from being parked on the side yard providing they’re parked on a hard surface.
“We don’t want petroleum oils and lubricants into the ground water," Erickson said. "And if you’re in the soils ordinance which is Prospector Square and a couple of other locations, we need to make sure that soil is not working up through the gravel and entering the air column.”
Though the item is being continued, there will be an opportunity for the public to comment on it. Wednesday’s meeting begins at 5:30.
I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.