Recreational vehicle parking on all Colorado Springs streets will soon be illegal, but city officials have granted a grace period to give remaining RV tenants time to find a place to legally park their motor homes.

The Colorado Springs City Council voted 8-1 on Tuesday to pass an ordinance that will bar RVs from parking downtown. The ordinance will automatically take effect in two weeks, but violators won’t face fines until June 1, the City Council decided.

During that “warning period,” Ecumenical Social Ministries hopes to work with the city to help several RV dwellers get off the streets and into an established RV park, said Ann Steiner Lantz, the organization’s executive director.

The ordinance, which won preliminary approval in December, extends citywide a ban that prohibits RVs from parking on residential streets any longer than for “the expeditious loading and unloading of passengers or property.”

Starting June 1, first-time offenders will be fined $25. The second fine will be $100, and the third, $125. Four tickets will draw a court summons.

Final approval of the measure was postponed unexpectedly in January after Councilman David Geislinger and Council President Pro Tem Jill Gaebler led a charge seeking a delay amid concerns that the ordinance would exacerbate homelessness in the city.

Councilwoman Yolanda Avila cast the dissenting vote on Tuesday, saying the ordinance “continues to be punitive to a very vulnerable group, to people experiencing homelessness.”

Police commanders proposed the ordinance amid concerns that RVs were clogging some streets and were surrounded by trash.

Authorities have also received complaints of wastewater being dumped onto city streets or down storm drains, police have said.

Many RVs have pulled up near the CityGate area, the planned site of a City for Champions Switchbacks soccer stadium.

While working with Colorado Springs police in the past two months, Ecumenical Social Ministries made contact with tenants in 18 of the RVs in the downtown area, Lantz said. More than a dozen of them are no longer parked there, she said.

The organization had estimated there were 20 to 22 RVs total downtown, primarily near Sierra Madre Street and Moreno Avenue; however, there could be more, said Lantz, who was among roughly a dozen people who asked the City Council to delay or oppose the ordinance at a January meeting.

One abandoned RV burned down, and two other vehicles were impounded to “reduce the risk of fire and criminal activity” at the request of other RV-dwellers, she said.

Other people living in motor homes left Colorado Springs or got permission from private property owners to park on their lands, Lantz said.

Ecumenical Social Ministries spent about $3,700 providing food, clothing, auto repair parts, gasoline vouchers, affordable propane heaters and towing to alternate locations, Lantz said.

A new pair of eyeglasses was also given to a couple who said the only reason they hadn’t returned home to Missouri was because one of them needed the glasses to drive.

The vast majority of RV tenants that the organization surveyed were native Coloradans, and about a third were “older adults with significant physical and mental health challenges,” Lantz said.

“This is some of the worst living conditions I have ever seen. Their RVs have no heat, no running water, and are poorly insulated,” she told the City Council. “Most of these are the older adults, for whom the RVs are their last-ditch efforts to (avoid) being on the streets.”

Those living in the remaining three to five RVs include a person with stage 3 cancer and a person with bipolar disorder, she said.

“They will not make it on the streets,” she told The Gazette.

The organization is working with a mobile home park owner who is willing to section off 2 acres of his park to make space for up to eight RVs.

The park could potentially allow RV dwellers a place to stay until caseworkers help them find a permanent place to live, Lantz said. However, renting the eight spaces might cost as much as $46,000, and Ecumenical Social Ministries would need some financial help, she told the City Council.

Several council members thanked Ecumenical Social Ministries, which runs a food pantry and shower facilities and offers other social services.

“This is the kind of engagement – public private partnership – that I’m going to look for going forward,” Geislinger told Lantz. “We need to get our hands dirty, and I commend you guys for doing that.”