A bump in the road

Jay Clark Brothers will think twice about where he leaves his car the next time he shops in Old Pasadena. After receiving a parking ticket for apparently no good reason, he says, it probably won’t be on the street.

About 10 minutes after 4 p.m. on May 3, the actor and South Pasadena resident pulled his green Saab into an unmetered two-hour parking zone along South DeLacey Avenue. When he returned a little more than an hour later, Brothers said he found a parking enforcement officer had left him a $37 ticket for overstaying the time limit — even though he hadn’t been in town long enough to possibly break the rules.

More disconcerting to Brothers was that his ticket was issued at 4:18 p.m. — about eight minutes after he shut off his engine — and read that an agent had first spotted his car parked there at 2 p.m., an hour and a half before he says he left South Pasadena. At the time, Brothers also noticed tickets left on several other vehicles that he believes were parked after his, leading him to assume a number of other people out there also received what he’s calling “a nefarious ticket.”

According to city records, 9,963 of the 192,485 parking tickets issued in Pasadena last year (about 5 percent) were contested, but about three out of four contested tickets were found by city investigators to be warranted. Tickets paid from July 1, 2006, through June 30 of last year brought in $5.3 million in revenue to the city’s General Fund, said interim city Finance Director Steve Mermell.

Brothers believes many other people who should complain about unfair tickets don’t, especially in situations when it doesn’t pay to take time away from work to fight a comparatively small fine.
“I’m wondering if I’m the only voice from that Saturday complaining about these tickets,” he said. “I wonder how often this happens.”

Before taking a few hours out of his day to file a complaint with the Municipal Services Division at City Hall, Brothers stopped by the offices of the Pasadena Weekly to show reporters his ticket and a 3:37 p.m. deposit receipt from the Wells Fargo Bank in South Pasadena that day.

Brothers’ contested ticket indentifies the parking enforcement officer who wrote it as George Gomez, who a day before writing that ticket was zealous in levying a fine against this reporter for overstaying time purchased on a De Lacey Avenue meter.

In that situation — a one-minute and potentially $37 mistake — fellow Weekly reporter André Coleman attempted to put money in the meter before Gomez began writing the ticket, but he was told by Gomez he’d issue a fine anyway after finding out from Coleman that he was not the vehicle’s registered owner.

Senior Parking Enforcement Representative Jose Valenzuela, who supervises parking officers in the field, reserved judgment pending the outcome of any investigation. “We have them in the field and they use their own judgment,” he said of parking enforcement officers.

Even though city employees supervise parking enforcement operations and handle claims of bogus tickets — including the 2,570 that were refunded in 2007 — the people who actually write most tickets aren’t city employees.

Since 1992, the city has contracted its parking enforcement detail to Inter-Con Security, a firm founded by an ex-LAPD officer which, according to its Web site, employs some 25,000 security agents through corporate and government contracts on four continents.

For all its global reach, Inter-Con is based right here in Pasadena — ironically, at 210 S De Lacey Ave., the address listed on Brothers’ allegedly dubious fine.

The Inter-Con Security contract is renewed through the City Council’s consent calendar, a list of items that are rarely discussed and typically approved in a matter of seconds, not minutes. The last time the contract came up was in 2005, when the company was granted an annual $544,400 deal for 30,000 hours of parking enforcement at $15.40 per hour plus up to $92,400 for additional hours.

That Inter-Con contract, according to city Parking Manager Bill Bortfeld, is valid through June of this year and is subject to annual increases based on the Consumer Price Index.

The deal is also subject to the city’s Living Wage Ordinance, which requires companies that contract with the city to pay employees $9.41 per hour plus medical benefits, or $11.01 per hour without benefits.

In February 1999, Inter-Con raised the rates it was charging the city for a separate $385,000 contract for securing city facilities because the Living Wage Ordinance would force them to pay their employees a base of $8.50 per hour without benefits instead of their previous base of $6.50 per hour. In 2005, the Living Wage Ordinance required Inter-Con to pay employees $10.28 per hour, or $8.78 plus benefits.

Inter-Con declined to comment for this story and referred any questions to Valenzuela.

Terms of the contract allow the city to bill the company for egregious errors or force them to take unfit employees off duty. There haven’t been any major problems though, said Valenzuela, except a few years ago when parking officers confused about city boundaries were incorrectly ticketing cars parked overnight just outside the city’s border.

Don’t think the city is ordering performance quotas, said Bortfeld: that would be illegal under state law.

But the city does see increases in parking ticket revenue of about $100,000 each year, said Bortfeld, who attributed those increases to continued growth and development.

Valenzuela said Tuesday that he’d soon be returning messages left by Brothers, if only to explain that the issue will be resolved by the city’s normal investigative process.

Bortfeld also hesitated to draw any conclusions about Brothers’ complaint before an investigation was completed, a process which could take up to six weeks.

And when it comes to whether people really do complain, Bortfeld is confident they do.

“We usually hear about it,” he said. “Whether they call us directly or call the mayor or the city manager first, the majority of the time we get that complaint, look up the citation, interview the officer and try to determine what actually happened. Many times people have gotten a ticket and just don’t like it; other times we made a mistake.”