Owners of boats, recreational vehicles and trailers now have fewer parking options in Fairfax County’s Dranesville District.
The county’s Board of Supervisors voted 10-0 on Sept. 29 to create the new community parking district, prohibiting many larger vehicles, watercraft and trailers from being parked on public streets in designated residential areas.
With the vote, Dranesville joins a large swath of the county where similar restrictions are in place.
The new Dranesville Community Parking District covers an area south of Leesburg Pike that is bounded by Loudoun County to the west, the Sully District to the south and Hunter Mill District to the east. The Town of Herndon is not included.
The district’s creation was approved over the objections of a couple of Dranesville District residents, who complained the proposal had been poorly publicized and amounted to a solution in search of a problem.
“The county has failed in their due diligence to provide a basis for this,” said Vincent Mendolia, one of two speakers at the public hearing preceding the vote.
“I have not seen any proof that there is a safety issue. There has been no evidentiary basis for it,” Mendolia said of the changes. “This process was done very poorly.”
Another critic, Suzan Fehrle, said many of her neighbors were unaware of the proposed change, and for the most part, they were not concerned about the types of vehicles on roadways that the district would prohibit.
“In my community, there are a few, and nobody really seems to care much,” she said. “They’re very well-kempt, they’re out of the way … I’ve never encountered one as an obstruction to traffic, either as a bicyclist or pedestrian.”
The parking restrictions for the western half of the Dranesville District were requested by Supervisor Jimmy Bierman in response to “reports of an excessive number of watercrafts, recreational vehicles, and trailers parking on public streets abutting multiple residential communities,” county staff said in a report included in the board’s agenda.
A “well-attended” community meeting on the issue was held in April, and an online survey conducted by the county attracted 117 responses, county staff said. Nearly three-quarters of respondents were in favor of the new restrictions.
Mendolia took issue with staff’s characterization of the public’s views.
“I attended the meeting. Despite what staff said, it was not overwhelmingly in support of this,” said Mendolia, who suggested a small group of residents in the McNair area south of the Dulles Toll Road was behind the district-wide restrictions.
No one spoke in favor of the proposal. Bierman was the lone supervisor to speak, saying he believed outreach in advance of the vote had been sufficient.
“We try our best,” he said. “I took a lot of steps to try and get a lot of community engagement.”
Vehicles that can no longer be parked on public streets in residential neighborhoods in the Dranesville Community Parking District include:
- Watercraft, motor homes, and all trailers and semi-trailers, regardless of whether they’re attached to another vehicle
- Any vehicle with three or more axles
- Vehicles with a gross weight rating of 12,000 or more pounds except school buses used to transport students
- Vehicles designed to transport 16 or more passengers including the driver, except school buses
- Vehicles of any size transporting hazardous materials as defined by Virginia law
The new district joins established ones that cover the entirety of the Mason, Franconia, Mount Vernon and Springfield districts as well as the Reston area in the Hunter Mill District and scattered neighborhoods in a number of other districts.
