At Frank Duran's house, over on East Third Street, the carefully mowed grass was green and lush, the flowers in bloom and even his shiny blue sedan looked washed.

It was parked up on the edge of his yard, on a well-planned patch of river rock.

Told that City Council is thinking about making it illegal for city residents to park in yards, Duran frowned as he sat in the cool shade of his porch.

"The city owns that part of my yard as a right-of-way but I'm expected to maintain it," he said, pointing to where his car was parked. It was next to the street but in the yard. "And now they want to tell me I can't park there?"

Duran thought about that a moment as his sprinkler went taka-taka-taka, keeping his grass green. Then he answered.

"They shouldn't be telling me what to do until they take care of their own problems," he finally said, pointing at a weed-filled yard not many houses away. "I've called about that house with the weeds, but does anything change?"

Cars and yards, yards and cars. Just drive around the East Side and you'll see an imaginative use of both.

On a recent morning, driving just four blocks on East Eighth Street, there were seven houses with one or more cars parked in their front yards. Not on driveways. Yards.

"This isn't the first time this question has come up," explained Karen Willson, who oversees the city's code enforcement office. "We've researched the question before, but the city hasn't restricted it in the past."

There seems to be a majority of council interested in doing so now. At last week's work session, council members sparred over what to do about homes where yards have become parking lots.

And many aren't well-kept like Frank Duran's yard.

"What gets me," District 4 Councilman Ray Aguilera said during the discussion, "Is all the people who think their front yard is a mechanic's garage. If we could get all the people to take their cars out of the front yards, the city would look a whole lot nicer."

Councilwoman Lori Winner, whose clean-up-the-city views helped her get elected, said the city already has rules against junk cars and parking recreational vehicles in yards. And new houses must have driveways and curb cuts.

"The parking rules ought to be the same as we require on new houses," she said.

District 2 Councilman Larry Atencio represents the East Side, and he frequently argues that any time the city wants to clean up or crackdown on something, it is likely to hit his low-income constituents the hardest.

"I see these kinds of violations on Bonforte (Boulevard) every day, but you're not going to enforce the parking rule on them because they can afford lawyers," he said. "So what if someone has two or three cars? I don't see this as a big problem."

District 1 Councilman Bob Schilling answered that ugly parking problems were a little like how the judges used to decide what was obscene: "You know it when you see it," he suggested to Atencio.

Problem or not, Atencio is right that yard parking is widespread in his district. A drive down Constitution Street showed that more than 20 houses had already half-paved their yards or graveled them for more parking areas.

There are many similar homes on Jerry Murphy Road.

"Those would have to be 'grandfathered' in because you couldn't tell people they had to tear up their yards," agreed Scott Hobson, a senior planner who is helping draft a proposed ordinance.

Here's part of the problem: city ordinances haven't been very clear on where people can park. Hobson said that when the city has ticketed people in the past for parking on the public right-of-way, that strip of land next to the street that Frank Duran uses, the cases have been tossed out of Municipal Court.

So Hobson and Willson are trying to draft a remedy.

The guidelines they got from council last week were like this:

Prohibit parking on the public easement that is next to the street. That typically means the land between the sidewalk and the street.

Prohibit parking in front yards, unless the homeowner has a circular driveway.

Put a limit on how much of the yard can be paved or rocked for parking purposes.

Allow parking on the sides of a house. That's a popular place to put extra cars, boats and even RVs.

Willson said that parking violations would likely be treated like weed problems or other code issues: City staff would leave a notice of violation and only issue tickets if the problem vehicles aren't moved.

Andrew Romero was doing spadework in a truck-filled yard on East Third Street last week. No, they weren't his trucks but he clearly didn't like it when told that council wanted him to get rid of the cars in his front yard on West Abriendo Avenue.

It seems Romero's car was hammered in a hit-and-run collision, and he's trying to get it running again. So, yes, it's under repair. In the yard.

"I'll move it when I get it fixed," he said firmly.

proper@chieftain.com