Elon’s town council has made a number of changes to the town’s parking restrictions at the behest of its municipal police chief.
During a regularly-scheduled meeting on Tuesday, the council voted 4-to-0 to prohibit parking against traffic – i.e. on the left side of the road – along two-way streets outside the town’s business district, where such a prohibition is already in place. Its members also agreed to revise the town’s parking ordinance so that drivers can no longer skirt time limits on parking by moving their vehicles to different spaces within the same city block.
In each of these cases, Elon’s police chief Kelly Blackwelder had recommended these changes to make things easier for department’s parking enforcement officer.
Blackwelder also encouraged the council to adjust the town’s regulations on golf carts to require the annual registration of these low-speed vehicles. Prior to this change, which the council adopted 4-to-0, Elon had a one-time registration requirement that Blackwelder insisted made it too easy for golf cart owners to dismantle mandatory safety features that they found annoying.
The town’s police chief added that the annual registration requirement would only apply to golf carts owned by businesses and institutions, like Elon University, which has about 50 of these vehicles in its motor fleet. The town allows these golf carts to venture onto public roads – a right that isn’t extended to those which belong to individual homeowners.
Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe suggested that the town’s registration requirement should be extended to these individually-owned golf carts since, in her experience, they’re already popping up in the roadways notwithstanding the town’s prohibition.
“I have seen kids as young as my [10-year-old] daughter driving them on the streets,” the mayor added.
The council took no action on Sharpe’s recommendation before it voted 4-to-0 to require the annual registration of golf carts.
Councilman Quinn Ray was absent from Tuesday’s proceedings.
