Truck parking lawsuit prompts ‘I told you so’ from trucker supporters

A truck parking lawsuit was officially filed this month after a battle over truck parking in a Florida neighborhood ended in defeat for the local truckers. 

The truck parking lawsuit was filed on April 12th on behalf of truckers Jorge Alfaro and Clare Dougal, who live in the Loxahatchee area in The Acreage in Palm Beach County, Florida. The ruling against truckers parking on their own property was made official on February 22nd after months-long arguments. 

Alfaro is a car hauler and Dougal hauls sod and building materials. Both drivers use their own properties to park their trucks when they’re not driving, but not after the official Palm Beach County decision banning their rigs from the neighborhood. Dougal says she’s been parking her truck in her own driveway since 2002. 

“Nobody wants to jump into a lawsuit. These people certainly don’t,” said West Palm Beach attorney Christopher Mills, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the drivers. “They don’t have any other options.”

Truckers living in the neighborhood have been given until July 1st to find a new place for their rigs, a deadline which Mills calls an “eviction order.”

“Property rights are an American value… they’re sacred,” Mills said to The Town-Crier. “The county can’t just take someone’s property without going through the proper legal steps and compensating people. That hasn’t been done here.”

Commissioner Sara Baxter previously suggested that the county allow two semi trucks per property, or that they at least grandfather in the truckers already living there, but the compromise was rejected, despite her warnings of a truck parking lawsuit.

“I told my fellow commissioners when we rejected this, we were opening ourselves up to a lawsuit,” Baxter said. 

“We knew this was probably coming,” Indian Trail Improvement District President Elizabeth Accomando said. “So, I’m not surprised.”

“My clients were there doing what they’d always been allowed to do,” Mills said. “Then there was a paradigm change for whatever reason… I think the evidence will show that there was a strategy involved in this.”

“At a minimum, the truckers who are there now should be grandfathered in,” Baxter reiterated. 

Mills says the truckers he represents are willing to settle the truck parking lawsuit out of court through “any solution that works.”