Mountain View wants court to throw out lawsuit contending RV ban is unconstitutional

MOUNTAIN Watch — Arguing that the city’s RV parking ban isn’t an try to “banish its small-income inhabitants,” Mountain Check out is inquiring a federal judge to throw out a course-action lawsuit trying to get to overturn the ban that was filed versus the city in July.

The lawsuit, submitted in the US District Courtroom for the Northern District of California, is remaining brought by six plaintiffs on behalf of all persons who stay in RVs and other oversized vehicles in the metropolis. It argues that the parking ban — which prohibits RVs from parking on most of the city’s streets — is “unconstitutional,” “inhumane” and burdens the expanding team of individuals who have picked out to stay in automobiles on the street amid a dire affordability crisis that has priced them out of the areas they know as dwelling.

In its first arguments presented to the court considering the fact that the match was filed, the city of Mountain View is contending that the ban isn’t concentrating on its poorest inhabitants and is instead concentrated on improving upon visitors protection together the city’s slim streets. The town also notes it has built fantastic strides in developing reasonably priced housing for lower-cash flow residents and has offered safer alternatives for folks dwelling in RVs, like its 101-place Safe and sound Parking program.

The city stated that plaintiffs dependent the lawsuit on the idea that the city has banned outsized autos in buy to banish its lower-money population, but the town argues it “has done no these kinds of thing.” The town states that the plaintiffs further more claim they are “at imminent hazard of acquiring the oversized motor vehicles they use as habitation taken away from them,” noting that “this as well can be simply disproven by judicially obvious information.”

“What plaintiffs’ complaint will make obvious is that the real goal of this litigation is to safe a proper to indefinitely identify their oversized automobiles on their most well-liked roadways, no matter of any potential risks this may pose to other vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists in their vicinity,” attorney Margaret Prinzig wrote.

“The actuality that plaintiffs have been compelled to stay in their automobiles is deeply unlucky, and the town is continuing its attempts to support its unhoused populace changeover to far better, safer housing possibilities,” Prinzig claimed. “Yet plaintiffs’ constitutional rights do not prolong everywhere around as far as they assert, and unquestionably do not prolong so significantly as to avert the metropolis from enforcing parking limitations that address community protection problems.”

Attorney Michael Trujillo of the Legislation Foundation reported he has taken a seem at the city’s arguments and is reviewing them. Plaintiffs’ have until eventually Aug. 30 to post a preliminary injunction to preserve the ordinances contested in the match from remaining enforced when the suit is adjudicated.

“We’re focusing on the preliminary injunction now,” Trujillo said, noting he had no other remark. “We really don’t want to get in advance of ourselves.”

The lawsuit will come three many years immediately after the metropolis adopted an ordinance banning outsized automobiles and RVs from 444 of the city’s 525 whole streets. Amid pushback from the city’s honest housing proponents, the ordinance was temporarily suspended soon after a thriving petition compelled the ordinance on the November 2020 ballot as Measure C.

With about 57% of the vote in favor, Mountain Perspective inhabitants passed the ballot evaluate in November, and in just weeks the city moved quickly to enforce the ban by summertime 2021. The to start with “no parking” indications are by now heading up in the city’s northwest aspect at the cost of almost $1 million, and inhabitants have expressed dread of being displaced.

Nevertheless the RV ban prohibits oversize cars from 83% of the city’s streets, yet another ban on parking oversize cars in streets with bicycle lanes tends to make it so about 90% of Mountain Check out streets are unavailable to RV people. The law foundation’s go well with promises Mountain Check out enacted the ban “under the pretext of ‘traffic safety’ in purchase to expel indigent populations” right after years of improved enforcement of parking legal guidelines that concentrate on the city’s car or truck people.

But the metropolis states it has handed two ordinances that prohibit the parking of all oversized vehicles — not just autos utilized as households — on the streets wherever they pose the biggest targeted traffic protection possibility: slender streets and streets with bicycle lanes.