Fined $275 for lawn parking
Homeowner Nina Racine was fined $275 for allowing her son to park his car on this strip of grass and gravel on her property.
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Updated: September 01, 2009 9:45 AM
For more than a decade, Nina Racine has parked vehicles in a narrow strip of her property with patchy lawn and boulders, located between her driveway and her neighbour's property line.
This year, for the first time, the city bylaws department fined her $275 for doing so.
Her transgression – parking on her lawn.
"They consider it a lawn. It's been a driveway for 11 years," she complained.
Racine lives on Mendham Street, near the east end of George Ferguson Way. Her son parked his Pontiac Sunfire, which she says is in good shape, in the parking spot for 10 weeks. He was away the entire time, pursuing a military career.
"This was a perfectly good car, parked on my property!"
She was warned to move the vehicle during the city's "spring cleanup" bylaw enforcement blitz. However, Racine didn't have any better place to park the vehicle.
Racine was fined $250, plus $25 for the appeal procedure.
"I was surprised it (the fine) was so high. And you don't even get to go to real court anymore."
Racine appeared before an adjudicator at city hall, and he gave an independent ruling that it was clearly not a parking space.
If the area was completely covered in gravel, she would not have been fined, she was told.
The city's manager of corporate communications, Katherine Jeffcoatt, confirmed that people parking on lawn will have them run afoul of city bylaws. However, she noted that dropping a load of gravel onto someone's property will not automatically create recognized parking spaces.
Recently, Racine read about the company, Carter-Smith that won a LEED award for having an environmentally sensitive headquarters in Winnipeg. It is one of only 10 buildings in Canada to win the honour (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and was called the greenest building in Manitoba.
One of the green features of this award-winning site, she noted, was lawn parking stalls.
Racine finds it extremely ironic that her own leadership in environmental design was viewed by city hall as a mere bylaw infraction.
"I figure they were just looking for more money to pay for the big place over there (the Abbotsford Entertainment and Sports Centre)," Racine said. "I get so sick of this. They're nickel and diming us to death."
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