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Collegedale commissioners will vote July 7 on what could be the last attempt for a revised parking ordinance before putting a stop to street parking altogether. Citizens will have a chance to comment before the second and final vote is taken Tuesday.
“This allows for our best attempt at a parking rule,” said City Manager Ted Rogers, who designed the new ordinance. “Past that I don’t really know what to suggest, but we do need to pass something. The only other alternative is no parking on the street. That’s the only other way we’re going to be able to fix the problems we have citywide.”
The upcoming vote follows a decision to table the issue in February, when commissioners decided to delay the second and final vote on an earlier parking ordinance.
“I thought back in January we had the best ordinance we’ve ever come up with,” Mayor John Turner. “This fine tunes that.”
According to the new ordinance, cars must not be parked more than 18 inches from the curb, and there must be at least 16 feet of clear road space to allow for service vehicles at all times.
“The intent of the ordinance is to allow service vehicles — the postal service, delivery trucks of the world, garbage trucks, what have you — to have routine passage throughout the city,” said Rogers.
According to Public Work and Utilities director Rodney Keeton, a typical garbage truck is probably between 12 and 14 feet wide. At best the city’s roads are 26 feet across, said city engineer Joe Farrow, but many are smaller.
In addition, no recreational or oversized vehicles would be permitted to be parked on the street unless being actively loaded or unloaded.
“It’s usually not passenger cars that are the problem,” said Rogers.
While commissioners agreed at the June workshop that parking in the city has been a problem for quite some time, Lt. Terry Smith said Collegedale police officers will not use the ordinance excessively.
“We’re not trying to be traffic Nazis,” he said. “We don’t want this for a hunting license. We want to work with everybody. We just need to have some basis to work from.”
Pending approval of the ordinance, he and the rest of the force will undertake a public educational campaign while the program gets off the ground, first issuing warnings and explaining the new rules before issuing citations to drive the issue home.
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