If your city is hard up for cash, why not use some obscure and questionable legal code to generate funds!
Beverly Anderson is mad as hell. She just started to get tickets for parking in her own driveway.
That’s right. The District of Columbia is ticketing people who park their cars in their own driveways.
“This is clearly an attempt by the city to extort money out of property owners,” Anderson tells WTOP.
Anderson has received two of the $20 tickets in the past month. Anderson has owned the Capitol Hill house (and the driveway, so she thought) for more than ten years and has never gotten a ticket. And she’s not alone.
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D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) says he’s been getting lots of complaints.
“For the first time in anyone’s memory,” Wells says. “People are starting to get ticketed in their own driveways. This is ridiculous and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
To that end, Wells called the Director of the Department of Public Works, Bill Howland, to find out why his agency was issuing these tickets.
“I asked him what’s going on,” Wells said, “Is this some kind of revenue raising or policy change? He said he’d get back to me.”
Wells said he asked Howland if his department would start issuing warnings for first time offenders.
“He said “No, we don’t do that’,” Wells said. “If the government is going to be unreasonable about this then we’re going to have to look at changing the law.”
So what does the law say?
“Any area between the property line and the building restriction line shall be considered as private property set aside and treated as public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner.”
Basically what that means is most property owners in the District don’t own the land between their front door and the sidewalk, but they are responsible for taking care of it. It’s why you can get a ticket for drinking beer on your front porch in the Nation’s Capital. You’re technically on public space. It’s also why the city can ticket you for parking in your own driveway if you don’t pull your car deep enough into the driveway beyond the façade of your house or building.
To be clear, we’re not talking about people who park in shallow driveways and let the rear of their cars block the sidewalk. The cars are off the road, off the sidewalk and in the driveway – just not far enough back for the city.
If you hit the link, do be careful not to let your blood pressure get too high when you read that the city is offering to “lease” this “public space” back to the homeowner so that they can stop the tickets.