Kent, WA Parking Rules: RV & Boat Parking (2026)

KCC 9.38.145 targets long-term street storage of recreational vehicles, boats, vessels, and trailers in residential areas. The rule applies to any street, highway, roadway, alley, or public right-of-way in a residential neighborhood: once one of these units has sat in place beyond 24 hours, the owner is in violation. The section supplies its own definitions rather than borrowing loosely from state law: a boat or vessel is any watercraft used or capable of being used as transportation on the water; a recreational vehicle takes the meaning fixed in KCC 8.09.020(J); and a trailer is any vehicle without motive power designed to be towed by another vehicle via a hitch or connector and ordinarily used to transport items on public streets and highways.

The 24-hour clock runs from when the unit is first parked, so owners rotating a boat or trailer to a different nearby spot to reset the timer would still fall under the neighboring reparking ban at KCC 9.38.095, which independently makes it an infraction to move and repark within the same block to avoid a citation. This RV/boat/trailer rule is a companion to the city's broader large-vehicle parking ban at KCC 9.38.130, which prohibits parking on any city street of a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over 14,001 pounds, but that section expressly exempts recreational vehicles because they are separately regulated here under 9.38.145.

Enforcement is handled through Kent's infraction process rather than criminal court. The chief of police holds no blanket suspension authority over this particular section, unlike the large-vehicle and trailer-storage rules, so the 24-hour limit applies consistently without a discretionary carve-out for special events.