Action Line: Parking issues in base housing

  • Published
  • By Col. John T. Quintas
  • 48th Fighter Wing commander

COMPLAINT:

Motorists are parking on Thunderbird Way in base housing to use the skate park located across the street. It is not uncommon to have one or several of the guest/visitor spots taken by individuals using the park and who are not guests of our residents.

We have 19 units and 36 parking spots (less than two per unit). After duty hours and on weekends these spots are mostly all taken by our residents with less than five "V" spots for any guest or for ourselves if we own two cars, which we are told we are entitled to and to coordinate with our neighbors. Recent responses from violators range from "we are base housing residents and are entitled to use this lot" and " I've always parked here with no complaint from the residents" which may be true, but that was during construction and not all homes were occupied, and finally "I had permission from a friend who used to live here".

We are now at full occupancy and this is now an issue.

RESPONSE:

I appreciate your concerns with the parking situation in the Thunderbird Housing Area. Unfortunately, parking is a concern across all of the RAF Lakenheath housing areas.

The UK specific rules on the number of authorized parking spaces per household is less than  two cars. When the units were renovated, the rules had to be applied; this restricted neighborhood parking spaces to 1.5 per household. The majority of families have two cars. We have numbered the reserved parking spaces to ensure everyone has one dedicated spot and marked several with a "V" for visitors and residents on a first-come, first-served basis. As these areas are paid using fenced Military Family Housing (MFH) funds, they should only be used by the MFH residents and/or their visitors.

There are alternative parking areas for those wishing to use the skate park. These areas include the 20 spots along Brandon Road and in the CDC parking area. Signage may help and the CE team are looking into that possibility. For the future, we may look into the provision of additional parking in the old Tobacco Housing area currently being demolished.

I would like to appeal to everyone's good nature to be neighborly, courteous and considerate when deciding where to park their vehicles. With the various construction projects scheduled in your area over the next few months, the situation may require even more patience and understanding from everyone. The new intermediate school gym is currently under construction and the Tobacco Housing will be demolished over the next several months. We will continue to research better solutions, but, in the meantime, we ask all of our housing residents to be considerate of each other when parking and be patient with the situation until a resolution can be generated.

Thank you again for sharing this issue. We are constantly looking for ways to make our base community better for our personnel and their families.

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