Parking Bill Could Put Denver on "Collision Course" With People's Rights, ACLU Warns

Update: At its May 8 meeting, Denver City Council passed the proposed parking rule changes after approving an amendment from Councilmember Jolon Clark related to grammar to narrow the new definition of a junker.

Councilmember Paul Kashmann also successfully added an amendment to the bill that gives an additional 48 hours before towing if enforcement officials “reasonably believe” someone is living in a junker slated to be towed. It also requires a report on every towed vehicle be submitted to council twice a year.

The only member who voted against the proposal was Candi CdeBaca.

Keep reading for our story published at 6 a.m. May 8.

Denver City Council will hold a final vote today on a bill that would make several changes to the local parking code after it was delayed a week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which sent a letter to the city asking it to pump the brakes.

“Our biggest concern with the law as drafted is we're worried about the harm it could have on people who are sheltering in their vehicles,” says Annie Kurtz, staff attorney with the ACLU of Colorado. “We're also worried about people who are living in poverty already struggling to maintain their vehicles.”

Among other things, the parking-change proposal would expand the definition of “junkers” — cars that are inoperable or extensively damaged — and allow those junkers to be towed more quickly.

But problems as small as a flat tire or a burned-out taillight could qualify cars as junkers under the new rules, Kurtz says, putting people who may not be able to afford maintenance immediately at risk.

Advocates for people experiencing homelessness point out that if people are living in a car and it gets towed, they lose their shelter. By making more cars count as junkers, city council makes that possibility increasingly likel.

“It’s a sentence to the real, extreme struggle of street houselessness,” says Terese Howard of Housekeys Action Network Denver. “Your vehicle is all that you own, and all your property is in that. You depend on that for your home. You depend on that for transportation. When that’s taken, you don’t have the ability to go to a health appointment, or to work, or to visit your kids.”

Housekeys Action Network is rallying people to attend the May 8 council meeting and calling on members to vote down the bill.

Councilman Jolon Clark, one of the proposal's main architects, says it was not intended to target people living in their vehicles; the idea emerged during the pandemic as a way to give street enforcement more tools to get large commercial vehicles — and abandoned vehicles — off the road in front of local businesses. Clark and Councilwoman Kendra Black, both of whom will be leaving council when new members join in July, have been working on the bill for the last few years.

“The example that I always remember is there was a giant RV that sat for months in my district that someone had just stuffed full of old tires,” Clark says. “No plates, nothing. … We worked with our city staff and the folks that do enforcement to say, ‘Hey, what are some of the reasons and issues with what's going on here?’”

Those discussions led to a proposal to expand the exact distance cars must move to be legally re-parked from 100 feet to 700 feet. That way, Clark explains, large vehicles would have to move to a different block every 72 hours — making the parking situation much easier for people who live in areas where company trucks for big brands like Walmart and Target often park.

According to Clark, the amount of time those vehicles can now park is about 144 hours because street enforcement is complaint-based — so that after people report that a vehicle has not moved for 72 hours, the city has to tag the car and then track that it remains in that same spot for another 72 hours.

In the process of proposing the new parking bill, councilmembers also attempted to fix a loophole that technically bans people from parking in the same spot in front of their own homes for more than three consecutive days — even if they leave during the day and return later in the evening. After an amendment to the plan, it now clarifies that cars shorter than 22 feet in length do not need to move a certain distance to be considered re-parked in areas without parking limits or meters. Cars are even considered re-parked if they are taken on a short trip and then parked in the same place.

Although that change represents some progress, advocates still worry about what will be done in extenuating circumstances — such as hospital stays that could mean a car won't be moved for 72 hours or more, or for those who live in RVs.

“The bill basically means that you cannot legally park RVs, or other large vehicles over 22 feet, or vehicles that have an attached trailer,” Howard says. “You essentially cannot have that vehicle without owning private property.”

But that's not the case, Clark contents. In 2019, Lakewood prohibited RVs from parking on the public right-of-way completely, causing a stir among residents; he says he thinks that city's move could be creating some confusion.

Some members of the public and a few councilmembers had expressed concerns about improper notice before tows during the April 24 council meeting. The ACLU sent its letter expressing concerns about the constitutionality of the bill to Denver City Council on May 1, hours before it was set to vote; council decided to postpone the vote for a week to consider the issue.

“We know that cars are a lifeline,” Kurtz says. “As we're making removing those vehicles from the road easier, we need to be really laser-focused on what that means...making sure that we're not removing protections that may deprive people of their rights under the Constitution and their means of survival.”

Kurtz explains that fees count as punishment for constitutional purposes and that by punishing people with towing and storage fees, the bill could be infringing on people’s rights.

Housekeys Action Network regularly hears stories about homeless individuals losing the cars they live in when they are towed, Howard says, noting that one person lost their parents' ashes when their vehicle was hauled away.

“It’s the opposite of helping people move forward in life,” she continues. “When we say we want to help people get on their feet and get housing, this is the opposite of that.”

Clark says that while this will change street enforcement rules, it doesn’t change the city’s rules governing what to do when people are living in their vehicles. “The city has never been able to ever just pull up and start towing away a vehicle that someone is living in,” he contends.

Still, Clark plans to offer an amendment related to the definition of a junker, because the ACLU rightly pointed out that a grammatical quirk made the definition much broader than was intended.

“It was registration 'and' inoperability, and somehow there was an ‘or’ in one place that would have let it be what their concern was, where just having expired plates or expired registration could be classified as a junker,” he says.

While other issues identified in the letter could be dealt with by an amendment, Clark says he prefers that some of the problems be clarified in a set of rules outside of the ordinance, so tjt the city can be more flexible.

“What we've asked the departments to do is outline what they're currently doing, what their commitment to do is when there is someone living there,” Clark says. “We're trying to really pin down and formalize is, what is that process that the city goes through? What resources are there?”

Giving leeway on these sorts of decisions doesn’t reassure communities that have experienced the effects of enforcement, counters Kurtz. “If there is so much confidence that it is possible to enforce these broadly written ordinances according to some moral, legitimate standards for me, it begs the question: Why can't they be codified as standards?” she asks.

It’s city council’s job to make sure that the ordinance sets the outer boundaries on what is possible to avoid a “collision course” with people’s individual rights, she concludes.

And Howard contends that although the bill’s sponsors claim it is about large commercial trucks in the right-of-way, the legislation is also clearly about homeless people living in their vehicles.

“There’s definitely a problem with the root of the intent,” she says. “It’s devastating. This bill needs to be killed. At the very least, they need to take away the definition of a junker and do some other amendments — but, really, it should be killed.”