The issue surfaced during the many City of Auburn meetings with various neighborhoods this year: Shouldn’t residents be allowed to park on unpaved areas within the right-of-way in some of the older neighborhoods without getting a ticket?

City officials learned that in the older neighborhoods – like the one between D Street and L Street Southeast – there are many places where the paved portion of the public right-of-way is just wide enough for two lanes of traffic, leaving no paved areas for on-street parking.

With a parking enforcement officer now on the beat, bound and determined to enforce the long-standing law that makes parking there a no-no, a lot of tickets have been written.

And the people getting those tickets are not at all happy about it. They believe the parking strips in front of their homes are part of their property and they have a right to park there.

“The way the city code was written … was if you parked on a grass strip in your neighborhood and it wasn’t paved and wasn’t intended for parking, you were more than likely going to get a ticket,” said Dennis Dowdy, the city’s director of public works. “In particular, if you were parked, and it’s in the public right of way and it’s unpaved, like in a grass strip between the pavement and the sidewalk, or if your vehicle was overhanging the sidewalk, you would get a ticket. Because that was the way Council set up the code years ago, and that’s the way it’s been for a long time.”

City staff got to work on the problem. On Nov. 17, council members passed an ordinance authorizing a five-month-long test within residential zones. Until the ordinance sunsets in April, residents may park without being ticketed for parking in previously prohibited unpaved parking areas. The catch is they have to obey the following restrictions:

• No angled parking is allowed. Vehicles must park parallel and in the same direction as the flow of traffic.

• The car cannot overhang either the sidewalk, pedestrian path, or the traveled way of normal traffic on the street.

• The area used to park must clearly be at least eight feet in width, outside of the traveled way, and not obstructing a sidewalk or pedestrian path.

Dowdy said the city will conduct the test during the fall and winter season to see if the valley soils can support this practice over the long term. That means residents should take extra care with wet soils to see that mud or other debris are not tracked onto the traffic lanes, and that they don’t mess up landscaped areas and offend the neighbors. An important goal will be determining what is required to meet residential parking needs in the established neighborhoods.

During the test period, city staff will review areas where gravel is used between the edges of pavement and the sidewalk to assure that each resident is taking care to clean up any gravel or other materials from the public street or sidewalk.

During that time, if residents observe that the new practice has caused any problems, they should contact the city code compliance office at 253-804-5094 so that each event can be documented and reported to the property owner who appears to be responsible.

And during the test period, city staff will keep the mayor and council apprised of any community concerns that arise so that the Council can decide if the parking code change should continue, or if any changes are necessary, or if the parking code change should sunset, at which time the parking code would return to what it had been before.

Dowdy said the city is considering various solutions, some that may entail a financial commitment by the residents, but people need to bear in mind those parking strips are public right-of-way.

“For instance, if we are going to do a Local Improvement District (LID) to solve the problem, it probably needs to take in a whole street corridor at once and not just a few houses,” Dowdy said. “The moment you try to do just a few houses, sure enough, someone else, a neighbor is going to park there, and people will resent that they paid for something and their neighbor is using it.

“We’ll have to work through some of those issues. For the time being, we are going to evaluate whether this test works or not,” Dowdy said.

The ordinance is applicable only to local public streets within residential parking zones.