Think Before Your Register Your RV!

By Ron West

You may not want to open that door!

Recent actions by the NRH City Council included the effective “taking” of the front, side or back 9½ feet of your property. By ordinance, the city leaders ignored over 13o petitions and input from 16 speakers before the council and did the bidding of 4 out of 7 members of the Planning and Zoning Commission. Their new ordinance prohibits the parking of any “recreational vehicle” as defined by another new ordinance, within 9½ feet of the street. This was done while ignoring the fact that state law has for some time precluded the parking of any vehicle over a sidewalk.

The 9½ foot “taking” was based on follow up work by city staff and was presented as a safety issue because RV’s could block line of site. We learned during the presentation by Mr. Curtis that

a) It takes about 200 feet to stop your car from 20 miles per hour and

b) nearly all of the city has sidewalks.

Because of Mr. Curtis’s facts, the council voted 5 to 2 to take the 9½ feet of your property for safety reasons. Virtually everyone who spoke before the council were asking for a 4½ foot set back instead of the 9½ feet. They did make a point of telling us that we still had to maintain and pay taxes on their 9½ taking.

Please don’t get the impression that the majority of the council was actually listening to citizen input on this matter. It appears that they had it in their minds to show the RVer’s their power from the onset of this matter. Mr. John Lewis had even gone so far as to take pictures of an extremely long RV in another city that protruded from the garage of the owner into the street. The pictures he took showed it to be illegally parked even without this new ordinance. He then superimposed his own pickup on multiple images to show how this illegally parked RV, would block anyone’s line of site. His explanation for his presentation was that he thought someone would want to change the 9½ feet. The only thing his presentation really did was to show that our council is not listening to anything we as citizens say before them in council meetings. We still haven’t figured out how they communicate between themselves since there is virtually no real deliberation in the pre-council and council meetings.

Aside from the fact that the above data presented by both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Curtis is erroneous and very misleading, there was another element to the presentation by Ms. JoAnn Stout from the Code Enforcement Office. She presented a slide showing a “registration form” for RV’s supposedly to protect the grandfathering of such vehicles. The form was not required by ordinance and was supposedly to be filed so that if a future complaint was received, they could look at the file instead of coming out to the RV owners home. Everyone there should have heard the BLEAP sound since this did not make a lot of sense.

So – one of our citizens decided to “test” the credibility of the local code enforcement people and guess what – a day or two after he registered his RV, code enforcement people visited him to measure from the curb to the front of his RV to see if it was “legal”. It was, so then they scoped out the neighborhood and visited a neighbor with their tape measure to see if his RV was “legal”. It wasn’t so I am sure they noted it in their little files for a revisit on January 2^nd, 2005 so they could write him a citation. At $500 per day, this is looking like big business for our supposedly money short city.

As the ordinance is currently written, registration is NOT required. If you owned any defined RV prior to the ordinance, the simple fact of when you purchased it is all you will ever need in discussions with Code Enforcement personnel. This would be adequately covered by your vehicle title. The only reason I can see for this “registration process” is to provide the city with an actual list of RV’s in the city for future legislative considerations. Registration of your RV may be giving the city the information it needs in the future to outlaw such vehicles in the city by ordinance – and then having a list to go by – to force you to move or sell them.

By the new definitions of RV’s, my own GMC Savannah Conversion Van falls under the definition of an RV. It has a high top and will not go under the 7 foot limitation now set by our city leadership. I don’t know about anyone else, but I do not plan to register my van with the code folks. I think for my own safety, maybe I need to buy a can of orange marking paint and draw a line across my yard at the 9½ foot distance from the curb. Unfortunately, even though the path from nearby apartments to the Linda Spurlock Neighborhood Park is across my yard, I am in the very small section of the city that does not have sidewalks.

I wonder how the city council now plans to handle the side yards with fences that are 5 feet from the curb such as at the corner of Glenview and Diamond Loch? According to their own testimony, it must certainly be a safety hazard that they must plan to look into? By Mr. Lewis’s slides, people entering Glenview from Diamond Loch have their vision obstructed by what used to be legal. Now that they have defined this as a safety hazard that they are aware of, surely they will do something about it.

I guess I haven’t mentioned that there is not one single report of any accident of any kind attributable to the parking of any RV in any yard anywhere in the city to this point. Safety is important but I strongly suspect that the real issue is trying to make NRH into a Colleyville or Southlake look-alike. Beauty is really important and people’s rights are just not that important – or are they?

Registration of your RV is your choice so I hope this information is helpful as you consider your own choices. Opening that door to code enforcement does not promise to really “help” you in any way.