Simi Council to Consider Ways to Resolve Street’s Truck Traffic Problem : Transportation: Addressing residents’ complaints, the city could ban parking by the tractor-trailers along a section of Los Angeles Avenue.

SIMI VALLEY —  With their massive steel frames and grinding sounds, the tractor-trailer trucks parked along the east end of Los Angeles Avenue have been annoying Denise Summer for years.

“It’s just terrible,” said Summer, one of 35 residents to sign a petition asking the City Council to get rid of the trucks.

Monday, the council will discuss ways of resolving the problem. It could ban truck parking on the stretch of Los Angeles Avenue between Yosemite Avenue and Stearns Street, where residents have complained. Or the council may ask the city attorney to step up enforcement of laws requiring truckers who are not making local pickups or deliveries to stay on designated truck routes.

Those alternatives, however, do not address “the issue of providing secure, accessible parking for truck/owner operators who reside in the city,” Environmental Services Director Diane Jones said in a report to the City Council.

“We have the truckers who need a place to park their trucks,” Jones said. “If you’re a trucker, it’s very important to you.”

As a result, the council also will consider increasing on-street truck parking on other streets and changing zoning laws to encourage the construction of a private truck stop. The panel could even decide to take the unusual step of operating its own truck stop.

It could cost the city $750 a month just to lease space for 30 trucks, and Jones cautioned that running a municipal truck stop “may be a time-consuming and costly undertaking for the city.”

Residents said they understand that the truckers have jobs to do and need a place to park. They just wish that place was somewhere other than a stretch of Los Angeles Avenue visible and audible from their homes on nearby side streets, the residents said.

“They’re just a little noisy. They don’t look too nice,” said Karen Martinelli, another resident who signed the petition.

The petition goes even further, contending that truck exhaust threatens children’s growing lungs and that the trucks block the houses’ mountain views.

The trucks, about a dozen, have also decreased property values in the neighborhood by $10,000 or more, the petition states.

“If we wanted to live this way we certainly wouldn’t own or rent property in this neighborhood. We would have purchased or leased property next to an interstate or truck stop,” the petition stated.

Summer, who moved to Simi Valley seven years ago, said the problem is fairly recent.

“You don’t pay the kind of money we paid to have trucks on L. A. Avenue like that,” she said.

This isn’t the first time the council has grappled with the issue. In 1992, it deleted the debated portion of Los Angeles Avenue from the city’s truck route. But to write a ticket for failure to stick to a truck route, police must observe moving trucks, not parked ones. As a result, the 1992 action has had little effect on the problem, city officials said.

In May, the Neighborhood No. 4 Executive Council voted unanimously to endorse an overnight parking ban for the segment of Los Angeles Avenue where trucks park.