Tickets coming for vehicles parked on front lawns
If you like parking on your front lawn, think again: The city will soon start ticketing you.
City council this week voted to crack down on lawn parkers by switching enforcement from the building department, which only acted on complaints and ticketed homeowners instead of drivers, to the parking enforcement department, which has agents driving around all the time.
The change stemmed from a council question Coun. John Elliott asked in June 2015, wondering what it would take to change the bylaw.
“When I was campaigning for the election, I was on Askin Boulevard talking to some residents there,” Elliott recalled Thursday. “It’s a beautiful, historical street. But the problem is some students would just park their cars right up on the lawn. It was basically an eyesore.”
Elliott spoke with some students on behalf of neighbours about their parking habits.
“It was a little bit contentious between the families and the students,” Elliott said. “The families are protective of those homes.”
So he figured something more should be done. He asked city administration for a report back on the topic. Then council agreed it was time to ban vehicles on lawns.
“It’s just one of those things, where you come down a nice street and see cars parked on the front lawn and it doesn’t have a really nice appeal,” he said.
The parking enforcement hasn’t yet determined the size of the fine, though it will likely be a standard no-parking infraction of $30.
“The only way to really fix the problem is to give a ticket to the offending car,” said Bill Kralovensky, the city’s operations supervisor of parking enforcement. “So we anticipate at first doing some education through the area, putting some notices up.
“Most of it is going to happen in the university area, student housing, that type of thing.”
The building department currently investigates on a complaint basis. But the nine daily commissionaires contracted by the city to enforce parking six days a week will soon simply slap tickets on offending lawn vehicles.
The bylaw should be written by mid-January, when the ticketing will begin.
Kralovensky said it should be easy enough for the commissionaires to ticket in certain areas, since they patrol there more often. Residential areas which do not typically have problems with lawn parking will be handled on a complaint basis.
The city’s annual parking enforcement budget is $1.3 million, while roughly $2 million is raised from parking fines. The city hands out some 77,000 parking tickets a year — ranging from $17 at expired meters to $350 for illegally parking in handicap spots — but Kralovensky thinks the commissionaires will easily add the lawn infractions.
“They’re already driving around those areas,” Kralovensky said. “Now when they’re checking those streets they will also be able to see cars parked on front lawns.”
The problem is some students would just park their cars right up on the lawn. It was basically an eyesore.