Elon’s municipal leaders have let out the clutch on some potential new rules that could replace the town’s relatively stringent restrictions on recreational vehicles, campers, and other motorized juggernauts.
The town took a tentative step toward this rule change on Tuesday when its planning staff rolled out the latest draft of some proposed amendments to the town’s land management ordinance that were originally pitched to Elon’s town council in February.
Foremost among these prospective tweaks is a relaxed set of guidelines for RVs in residential areas, which must be garaged under the town’s current rules unless the owner obtains special permission to keep them outdoors.
The town’s planning staff originally began to have second thoughts about these restrictions last fall when a resident of the town’s extraterritorial jurisdiction complained about a neighbor’s RV, leading to the discovery of dozens of illegally parked RVs both inside, and outside, Elon’s municipal limits.
On February 10, the staff pitched a plan to the council that would’ve transferred the regulation of RVs from the land management ordinance, which applies to Elon’s territorial limits as well as the ETJ, to its code of ordinances, which is only effective inside the town’s borders. This proposal nevertheless drew an intense backlash from residents of the ETJ who objected that they hadn’t been consulted about the prospective change. In response, Elon’s town council decided to leave the regulations within the land management ordinance and instructed the planning staff to hold community meetings about the precise form these provisions should take.
On Tuesday, town planner Isabel Cooper approached the council with the results of this process.
In addition to recreational vehicles, these recommendations seek to address the placement of campers, trailers, and even watercraft. In each case, they would allow these to be parked in a residential driveway as long as they remain at least 20 feet from the road.
The planning staff’s proposed changes would also forbid the owners of these vehicles from hooking them up to water or sewer services. In the meantime, the owners of junked or otherwise undrivable RVs would have to surmount an additional hurdle if they want to keep them in front of their homes.
“If they want an RV that is unlicensed or inoperable, they would have to get a special use permit,” Cooper explained when she presented the rules.
Cooper noted that these proposed regulations were composed based on feedback from the aforementioned community meetings. They nevertheless failed to impress the town’s planning board, which unanimously recommended against them in August because they felt RVs would be better regulated as part of the town’s code of ordinances.
During Tuesday’s discussion, Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe had some scathing words for the planning board over its continued insistence on an option that the council had already mulled and rejected.
“It is not going into the code of ordinances,” she reminded the rest of the council about this consensus. “We’ve talked about this for eight months. . . and we’ve already beat that topic to death.”
The rules that Cooper presented nevertheless struck Sharpe as “incredibly fair to both sides,” while councilman Randy Orwig favorably judged them to be “right in line or maybe a little more restrictive” with the rules in other communities.
The proposed regulations also went over well with local RV owner Sam Lynch, who was one of several residents in attendance on Tuesday when Cooper unveiled the planning staff’s recommendations.
“The previous ordinance is something that no RV owner could live by,” Lynch declared when the council opened the floor to the public that evening, “and I appreciate the town council relaxing the restrictions.”
Other audience members fell in line with Lynch’s position after the town’s leaders addressed their misgivings about the proposed changes.
Cheryl Williams, a resident along Powerline Road, raised some concerns about people who temporarily live in RVs while their homes are being renovated after disasters. The town’s leaders assured her that the proposed rules wouldn’t affect these provisional arrangements, which are permitted for up to 18 months under the land management ordinance.
Meanwhile, Philip Gilliam wanted to make sure that the proposed rules wouldn’t prevent him and his wife from opening their camper to family members who visit them during holidays.
“Not everybody can afford a hotel for a week,” he added. “But we don’t ever hook up to water and sewer because mainly I don’t want to deal with that.”
The town’s leaders, likewise, assured Gilliam that the revised ordinance wouldn’t interfere with his holiday traditions.
In the end, the council directed the town’s planning staff to make some relatively minor revisions to the proposed rules before they come up for a final decision later this month. Its members also requested some additional language to clarify that RVs can still be stowed in garages and similar enclosures in addition to a home’s driveway.
In the meantime, Sharpe encouraged her colleagues not to keep spinning their wheels over the town’s response to a complaint that a single resident raised in 2025.
“This all came about because one neighbor didn’t like that their neighbor had an RV,” she recounted. “That set off the last several months of discussing RVs, and I think what’s being proposed is a solid middle ground.”
