An Illinois city recently voted to prevent trucks from parking on city streets — and now they’ve turned their attention to trucks using the parking lots of businesses that have been closed for years.
City officials in Joliet recently banned truck parking on city streets by officially eliminating a permit that they say no one had applied for in decades.
The Herald-News reports that the city only learned that truck parking was allowed in the first place when someone actually applied for the obscure 48 hour truck parking permit that would allow drivers to park on city streets with certain restrictions.
“Apparently, no one between 1987 and now has asked for a permit. With background knowledge of the council and trucks, we thought this probably is not the best thing,” City Attorney Martin Shanahan explained.
Now that the permit has been eliminated, the Joliet City Council has reportedly turned its attention to the matter of semi truck parking in the lots of shuttered stores.
City Council members say that they’ve noticed several trucks parking in the lots of former Sears and Kmart stores and that they’d like to take action. The former Kmart store has been closed since 2016 and the Sears shut down earlier this year.
Council members say that they aren’t sure who owns the parking lots — Louis Joliet Mall management or Seritage Growth Properties — but that “between the mall, Seritage and Sears we should be able to find the truth there and get something done.”
Joliet is located in Will County, an area where residents have loudly resisted the increase in truck traffic due to new intermodal facilities.