One option we are looking at is to engage our local council in a Strata Community Parking Agreement, whereby we install signage outlining parking hours etc and the local council rangers then patrol the visitors carpark and fine offenders.
I understand very few if any councils are prepared to get into these arrangements, for a combination of the following:
- Parking officers patrolling indoor areas is a Workplace Health and Safety issue
- Very few strata schemes have a clear definition of what illegal parking is
- This often becomes a dispute between neighbours
- Strata schemes get anxious when they realise otherwise compliant residents might also be pinged for parking over the boundary lines of their parking spots
- It’s just not cost effective.
To get back to point 2 on that list, have you defined in a by-law what a “visitor” is.
Is it someone who doesn’t live in the building but stays for a couple of hours. How about someone who has a friend in the building, who stays all day. Is someone who frequently parks overnight a visitor? How about the additional Airbnb guest for whom there is no parking space attached to the lot? How about the romantic partner of a resident who parks all weekend, every weekend? Or the family who use their garage as a rec room, or their parking space for storage.?
There is no universal or even state-wide legal definition for this – which is good. It means you and your neighbours get to define it to suit the lifestyles of the majority in your block through a by-law.
So, in your position, I would canvass all the resident to find out how they feel a visitor should be defined in a by-law, then get that by-law passed and adopted.
Once you have that in place, you can start issuing breach notices to residents and owners. Once you have sorted them out, you can turn to non-resident rogue parkers – a whole other box of snakes. A secure parking entrance gate controlled by electronic fobs would be a start.
But first you have to define what your block feels defines a bona fide visitor.