GUEST WORDS-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed budget for 2014-2015 includes increased revenue from the collection of parking fines and the addition of 50 additional parking enforcement officers. Budget-driven parking enforcement policy is a big issue with Angelenos these days. Unfortunately, it appears that the Mayor has chosen to continue along the beaten path of aggressive ticketing as a budgetary salve.
Everyone can agree that parking enforcement is necessary to a well-managed city environment. No one wants to see parking spots in a commercial district hogged all day, fire hydrants blocked or handicap spaces abused. But what happens when the Parking Enforcement office of the Department of Transportation gets sent a revenue bill from the City?
Parking enforcement must be exercised as a necessary and vital service rendered in the public interest. It should facilitate commerce, ease of transit, and livability for city businesses and residents. But when a parking ticket revenue target is mandated by the city budget, it becomes a de facto quota and all other considerations fade. Parking enforcement officers then become revenue collections agents. Protestations from city officials to the contrary aside, the reality is that the practice on the street is “ticket ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out”.
“God”, in this case, is the Parking Violations Bureau. It is well-known that it is the practice of that entity to deny all contested tickets initially since few citizens will go to the considerable trouble required to take the matter to a hearing. This has resulted in a system in which revenue collections officers, saddled with a budgetary imperative and the need to “earn their keep”, fan out across the city daily and ticket everything in sight, secure in the knowledge that citizens can do little to protect themselves against erroneously written tickets.
In the above context, three things need to happen:
First, there needs to be an end to the budgetary practice of parking violations revenue targeting.
Second, the Parking Enforcement office needs to adopt the expressed mission of service to the public, defined as facilitating commerce, ease of transit, and livability in the City.
Third, the Parking Enforcement office needs to adopt and publish explicit ticketing guidelines and there need to be clear consequences for officers who issue a high percentage of contested or invalidated tickets.
It's difficult to believe that our new Mayor really thinks that squeezing the citizen motorists of Los Angeles harder than ever is the path to "fiscal sustainability”. Perhaps a few thousand dollars could be spent on a study of the potential additional sales tax revenue that would be generated by increased economic activity in our business districts resulting from a parking regime that emphasizes service to the public over revenue generation. We’re willing to bet that the benefit of such a policy shift would far surpass the mere $5 million dollars that the Mayor hopes to net with his current approach.
Mayor Garcetti has missed an opportunity to initiate a major and much needed (and demanded) policy shift for what amounts to 0.062% of the total budget. Frankly, we were hoping for more vision than that from his administration.
With regards to the size of parking fines, the City seems to have adopted the attitude and practices of a monopoly capitalist enterprise with a corner on the market: charge whatever the market can bear.
But in the case of Los Angeles Inc., there are no regulations or regulatory bodies to safeguard the public interest…other than the voters themselves. Responsible, public service oriented government would not ask itself “How large of a fine can we get away with?” Instead, it would ask “What is the fine required to gain compliance from the average citizen?”
With the lowest parking fine now $58 and an expired meter costing $63, workers earning at or near the minimum wage are being robbed of an entire day’s wages for offenses which create no direct public harm or hazard. We think that fines which do not involve a public hazard or are not related to handicap parking should be capped at the Bureau of Labor Statistics average wage for the city, which is currently about $25.00. Most reasonable people would agree that the threat of losing an hour’s wage is sufficient to incentivize compliance by the average citizen.
We also note that, once again, the proposed budget includes a transfer of more than $30 million in “surplus” out of the Special Parking Revenue Fund into the General Fund. The SPRF is set up to address the supply side of the parking issue and the law mandates that the City have a 5 year plan for creating new and better parking.
Funds left over after maintenance costs and expenses related to fulfilling the 5 year plan are considered “surplus” and may be transferred to the General Fund. Since there is no 5 year plan for parking supply and there is—yet again— zero expenditure for new parking facilities, there cannot be a “surplus”.
Simply neglecting to spend the money in the fund as intended does not create a “surplus”. It simply means that the City remains utterly negligent in addressing the supply side of the parking issue. But then again, we are talking about a City that has for decades totally neglected the most basic, rudimentary tasks of municipal governance such as sidewalk repair.
If City Hall can’t manage even “City Government 101” level responsibilities such as safe, level sidewalks, it’s probably a bit much to expect them to tackle really substantial matters such as parking supply.
Los Angeles Parking Freedom Initiative is bringing attention to these issues and working towards solutions. We remain hopeful that our ongoing discussions with city officials will lead to reasonable and common sense changes in the City's parking policy.
However, we also remain committed to bringing a parking reform initiative to the ballot for the March 2015 citywide election.
(Steven Vincent and Jay Beeber are activists behind The Los Angeles Parking Freedom Initiative. Reach them also on Facebook.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 33
Pub: Apr 22, 2014
