Longtime trucker residents of a Florida neighborhood say they may soon be forced to sell and move thanks to a new initiative looking to enforce an overlooked ban on parking trucks on their own properties.
According to CBS 12 News, residents of The Acreage in Loxahatchee, Palm Beach County, Florida have technically never been legally allowed to park their semi trucks on their property, but have been doing so without complaint for more than a decade. Now, as new neighbors move in and the neighborhood grows, they are submitting complaints about the trucks to the county, who says that they have to respond if a complaint is filed.
“You’ve got a changing population in the acreage community, and you’ve got neighbors that are calling and complaining against neighbors,” said Palm Beach County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay.
“If a problem is brought to our attention, then we have to go and look at it,” McKinlay continued.
“It’s frustrating for them [longtime trucker residents] because they have been able to do this without anybody noticing. It doesn’t make it legal for that to have occurred, it’s just we typically don’t have the staff and the resources to just randomly patrol neighborhoods,” she added.
Longtime resident of the area and truck driver Ricky Shepherd says that he’s been parking his truck at his home for more than ten years, and that this new opposition may force him to leave.
“Oh my God,” Shepherd said. “When I came here, this thing was boondocks. That road over there was dirt road but now, a lot of people moving, so they want different things now. Maybe sold it and leave, if it comes to that.”
For now, McKinlay says that some people living in the area are considering turning the Acreage into its own city, which would allow the residents to create their own zoning and code rules.
McKinlay encourages any residents who have a problem with recent code enforcement to speak to the improvement district, and potentially get the topic on the commission’s agenda in the future.