During a Feb. 1 committee meeting, Buffalo Grove’s trustees upheld the 40-year-old ban against parking overnight on residential streets. Its most direct intent is simple — keep the roads clear for snow plowing.
But it may also be an efficient weapon against families amassing unhealthy amounts of clutter.
Because, if you want to park a car on your street, you first have to prove to the police that you are already keeping one in your garage. Sgt. Mike Rodriguez, who leads the BGPD’s traffic unit, has broken that news to a few cluttered homeowners.
“I’ve definitely gotten a few of those, like ‘Well, I’m moving out my kid,’ and I’m like ‘Well, once you’re done with that, you’ll be good to go,'” Rodriguez said.
Since at least 1976, Buffalo Grove has banned families from parking cars on residential streets from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., officials said.
In his presentation to the committee, Police Chief Steve Casstevens said he found that 19 of 24 nearby municipalities had similar laws. He said his staff had been getting “a few questions” about the law’s specifics and necessity, so he wanted to update the trustees about its presence.
Casstevens said the ban served several functions:
* Vehicle-free residential streets are simple for snowplows to clear.
* The fewer cars that sit out overnight, the easier it is for both patrolling officers and neighbors to notice a suspicious presence parked somewhere.
* It gives Village Hall leverage against families that might dump a broke-down vehicle on their street.
And the police enforce the law: Casstevens said that his officers handed out more than 1,000 such tickets per year for each of the last three years.
But they make exceptions much more often than they write tickets, Casstevens said. In each of the past three years, his department issued around 4,000 special permits for single- or multiple-night stays, he said —sometimes for a single guest, sometimes for a family’s holiday visit.
“We always take care of those residents,” he told the trustees.
And then there is the possibility of a year-long exception. Rodriguez said there are fewer than 40 annual street-parking permits floating around Buffalo Grove, because his staff is far more picky about who they free from the constraints of a law their neighbors must adhere to.
Casstevens said that most of the recipients of a yearly permit are in the village’s oldest subdivisions, where a family of four or more is living with a one-car garage and a one-lane driveway. If the children are high-school aged, they might own four cars. But to get that exception, an inspector is going to have a look-see in that garage, Casstevens said.
And if that inspector finds a pile of stuff where a car could go, the homeowner won’t get a permit. Rodriguez said he and his staff want to hand out as few annual allowances as possible, for a pair of reasons:
* There are nights where every car has to get off the street, no matter what, and the fewer phone calls the police have to make, the better. Rodriguez noted that, on evenings when snowfall exceeds two inches, every kind of overnight parking permit is canceled, and every on-the-street car has to make way for the incoming plows. Each permit is issued to a specific vehicle, and the police have phone numbers for each vehicle’s owner, so the fewer people they have to call at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m., the fewer headaches for everyone.
* Rodriguez said that making exceptions is always a slippery slope.
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Casstevens told the board that he did not see anything about the existing ordinance that needed correction.
“For us, it really hasn’t been an issue,” he said.
Neither was it for the trustees, who opted to leave it alone.
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer