Palm Coast government is moving toward relaxing prohibitions on commercial vehicles parked in residential driveways while still maintaining relatively strict regulations.
In sum, small work trucks and vans typically used for services such as air conditioning, painting, pest control, plumbing and the like will be allowed to park in driveways, uncovered. So will trucks with racks, as long as the racks are modest and part of the truck’s tools. Only one truck would be allowed in a driveway.
Vehicles within the allowable size and passenger vehicles with commercial messages will also be allowed to keep their messages uncovered. Those messages will not be policed.
Larger commercial vehicles, including box trucks like dry cleaning vehicles, passenger vans, small and large trailer trucks, actual trailers of any kind, limousines or taxis, and of course dump trucks or larger commercial vehicles will continue to be prohibited.
Based on a discussion at Tuesday’s Palm Coast City Council workshop, the proposed measure, which would be up for a vote later this month or early in October, has the support of Mayor Mike Norris and council members Ty Miller and Theresa Pontieri. The initiative was originally proposed by Pontieri. Council member Dave Sullivan said he will oppose the measure no matter what. Council member Charles Gambaro was skeptical about the proposal but did not show his hand.
“This is a good middle ground here. This has been kind of an issue for a very long time,” Miller said. “It’s not allowing these large vehicles in driveways, but it is allowing kind of the working class to do their job and go home.”
There is also a benefit to the Code Enforcement division: commercial vehicle enforcement and swale parking enforcement are among the division’s top offenses. Not having to cite for a certain class of commercial vehicles would lighten code enforcement’s workload.
“How much will this change of complexity or the look of the city of Palm Coast?” Gambaro asked. “It’s not what happens here in the next year or two. How does the city of Palm Coast look 20 years from now?”
Gambaro was also curious about loosening language allowances. “Just for example. Let’s say Ty Miller was announcing that he had a strip club business, and parked that van next to me, let’s use it as an example, with whatever vulgarities or whatever, that would be allowed?” Gambaro asked.
“That’s correct,” Code Enforcement Manager Barbara Grossman said. “I cannot read the content. That’s per the Supreme Court,” Grossman said.
“Not that Ty would run that kind of a business,” Gambaro said. (He does not.)
The concern may be overstated: the city currently does not police the signs on anyone’s property. Those signs are not restricted to politics, nor to political seasons. Anyone can put a sign, commercial, political, ideological, religious or otherwise on a front lawn, facing the public right of way. The content may not be restricted by the city. The only thing the city may regulate is the location of the sign, the number of signs, and the size of the signs. The freedom has not provoked a rash of unseemly abuses.
The proposed allowance for “ladders or other attachments which do not exceed the height of the highest point on the vehicle by more than two feet or does not exceed the length of the vehicle’s length by more than two feet” drew the most concern, even from Pontieri. “This is more than I had bargained for when I suggested we relook at this code,” she said.
“If we allow vehicles that have a lot of things piled on top of them, we are going to see more swell parking,” Pontieri said. “I would get rid of these exceptions.” She has no problem with ladders. But she does with “other attachments,” especially if materials can be piled for up to 2 feet. And a line about attachments having to be “kept in a neat, clean and well-kept manner” worries her for its subjectivity. One worker’s neatness can be an OCD-addled neighbor’s abomination.
To Miller, the allowance is not for extraneous materials that would not be on the truck as it is driven, in compliance with road rules, around town.
Alternately, Pontieri said, commercial vehicles could be cited when in swales. “ I don’t want to not be business friendly. Obviously, that’s why I asked for us to readdress this code,” she said, “but I do feel that business owners need to be responsible for the way their employees, I guess, behave when they’re driving their businesses’ vehicles.”
Citations will go to the owner of the vehicle–the bearer of its registration–and not necessarily to its driver.
City Attorney Marcus Duffy cautioned: “I’m not going to be able to have language that doesn’t catch all.” And Sullivan will not change his mind: “I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m not going to be in favor of any changes to the current regulation, no matter what,” he said. “I think it’s going to be too hard. You’re going to create a new code that will force just as many problems into the future, because people will be pushing the limits of whatever code we come up with,” Sullivan said.
Curiously, the item drew only two public comments. In the past, the proposal has drawn public reactions in droves, with passion on both sides. But as with the relaxing of outside paint colors, the longer the matter was discussed, the lesser the public response. That may yet change when the council votes on the proposal’s first reading.
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