In a world where everyone must drive to meet basic needs, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish a tax from fees and fines that only ever go up and have the worst impact on people least able to pay them.
Following a three-part series of stories on parking, overnight parking and traffic enforcement in Pasadena, we found that these ticket-writing practices here weren’t the worst in the country. In the parking category, that dubious distinction belongs to New York City, which raked in $600 million last year in parking fines. Here, Pasadena officials took in a lot less money, but still managed for the past two years to write more than 195,000 parking tickets each year in a city of roughly 140,000 residents. Frankly, we thought that was a little excessive, if not also counterproductive and possibly even anti-business, as Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Paul Little, a former City Council member, suggested.
It’s remarkable to think that the city has essentially been running a multimillion-dollar enterprise with no one permanently in charge of the city parking division since the departure of former Parking Manager Bill Bortfeld last year.
It is in the spirit of both improving the city’s performance and image on parking and traffic enforcement issues as well as saving people from being picked clean that we offer 10 suggestions for improvement.
1. Parking fines generated $5.3 million for the city last year, and are expected to raise $6.2 million next fiscal year — a lot of money for a department that doesn’t even have direct oversight. Hire that person now. Along with his or her ministerial duties, that person and staff would serve the board members of our next suggestion.
2. Form a citywide citizens’ parking commission answerable to the City Council to meet monthly to hear complaints and review reports from Inter-Con Security Systems, which handles parking enforcement for the city.
3. Freeze fines for expired meters at $30,
then raise all other parking fines only every two years.
4. Increase free parking in city garages from 90 minutes to two hours.
5. Offer a first-time warning. Ticket-writers already have violators logged into their computers and can access that data when they’re ready to write someone up.
6. Allow any resident to park on the street after paying for a permit. No proving that the car is registered to the address, no capricious decisions by city bureaucrats that residents have enough room to park, and no insult or injury to taxpayers willing to pay to park on streets that their tax dollars maintain.
7. Allow residents to obtain overnight parking permits for guests on an annual basis, rather than each time someone needs to
stay the night.
8. Place a two-year legislative moratorium on raising fines associated with already exorbitant red light and speeding violations.
9. Increase by two weeks the time allowed to pay all traffic fines.
10. Base Vehicle Code fines on an ability to pay and allow poverty-stricken violators to work off costs through community service.
Wise leaders know that punishment without mercy is many things other than just. In the case of driving and parking in Pasadena, it’s exploitive. Pasadena is better than that. Here’s a chance to prove it.
Okay Kevin, you cover it well in your first three paragraphs here, and then you go all "Democrat" on us. In that third paragraph you summarize:
"It’s remarkable to think that the city has essentially been running a multimillion-dollar enterprise with no one permanently in charge of the city parking division since the departure of former Parking Manager Bill Bortfeld last year." Can you spell: "Lack of oversight?"
This information here tells the hoi polloi of Pasadena (and we all know who we are) that the city fully intends to lay the greatest burden of automotively focused, punitive taxation on the increasingly strangled (monitarily at least) middle and lower class, mostly colored folks of our rosy little city.
And how do we know this? Well, by your recognition of the obvious, that being the Superior Court Clerk's punitive taxation, collection line vastly overcrowding its hallways every day. Did you know that standing in the court clerk's line during its "rush hour" without exception takes longer than an hour? God, how the law-enforcement class must be so terribly entertained by the fact that all the parking meters surrounding that courthouse expire in an hour.
So the Weekly has been telling us for the last month or so how the city government is screwing us average rubes blue in the face with their motor vehicle punitive tax scam. But instead of suggesting to our police state's victimized driving public that they should maybe get physically activist about the State and local government's unconstitutionally criminal, grand vehicular extortion racket, you merely make ten suggestions about how we can plead with our racketeering-predisposed government servant class to please, not steal too much of our money from us ... yeah, that's going to work real well.
Instead Kevin, why don't you Fourth Estate types ratchet up the investigative reporting on this expanding crime spree? I'll even make an initial suggestion or two.
Seeing that the City made 5.3 million dollars last year by issuing parking fines, tell me, how much money did the city legally rake in by issuing parking permits?
The contrasting relationship between those two amounts can -- statistically -- be very revealing.
Also, break down for us by district how much was collected in parking fines.
DanD