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Opportunist ‘parking thieves’ who grab unit block parking spots while they shop or commute to work could face fines of $550 when local council parking officers are allowed to patrol strata parking under changes to the state’s strata laws.
However, once parking wardens are in a building, residents too can be ticketed for parking in disabled spots, on common property driveways and even for parking over the boundaries of their parking spaces.
The detailed proposals for the update of strata laws – currently being examined by members of the NSW Cabinet – include provisions for local council parking wardens to be invited into apartment blocks and townhouse developments, mainly to help keep non-residents from stealing parking spots.
The details of who can be fined for what will be part of matching changes to the Local Government Act.
While owners corporations (bodies corporate) can deal with owners and tenants who park illegally, they have no sanctions against outsiders who gain access to their buildings and park for free. The law specifically forbids cars being clamped or towed without the owners’ permission.
This is a huge problem for unit blocks near business centres or railway stations, where rogue parkers – or parking thieves, as they are increasingly known in strata – will park for free in visitors’ parking, on driveways or even in owners’ spaces, knowing they are safe from any legal sanctions.
Under the new laws, strata scheme’s owners corporations will be able to make arrangements with local councils to ticket illegally parked cars. The maximum fine of $550 is part of across the board efforts to beef up all the sanctions for bad behavior in strata schemes and is a massive rise from the $220 previous maximum fine for many minor infringements.
“I assume the devil will be in the detail of negotiations between strata schemes and local councils which will set the actual fines,” says Gerry Chia, secretary of strata advocacy group the Owners Corporation Network (OCN). “But this is a huge issue in many buildings and the proposed law change is something for which we pushed very hard in our discussions with Fair Trading.”
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In my view, as owners of private property, OCs and their SMAgents need to be able to simply, easily (low time/$cost) Access statutory authority with severe penalties – to permanently get rid of each “parking thief” (©JimmyT) (A) their actions and (B) the vehicle (say)
(A) a person eg, the EC secretary/delegate, serves a notice ONto the vehicle itself (waterproof & securely fastened but not damaging) giving (say) 3 days to
(i) identify themselves (nominated email & on-site letterbox) AND
(ii) get the vehicle off-site
failure to comply within 3 days
(B) the EC’s secretary/delegate can issue a notice to the council for prompt = immediate removal & impounding (like strata tenants) – all council’s (prescribed) costs – transport, storage, management and internal + external ‘legals’ – against vehicle owner, the owner’s situation with the driver is his/her problem
Clearly the statutory authority/council needs to be virtually guaranteed a system of cost-recovery/disposal rights – before costs overtake vehicle value – should no one turn up for the vehicle
the system should apply across all vehicles parked/stored/dumped/abandon on private property
So much for promises – I emailed Randwick Council asking it to debate the issue at a meeting and a staff member rang back to say they do not have the resources to administer illegal parking and do not intend to do anything about it. So we are no further ahead