'Curb' your enthusiasm...
… for bilking of us out of millions in ‘curb taxes’ — unfair parking fines
By Kevin Uhrich 03/18/2010
Thinking of moving to Pasadena?
If so, break out your checkbook right now because there is already a parking ticket with your name on it awaiting your arrival.
In a city of around 140,000 people, 391,008 parking tickets were issued in 2008 and 2009 alone. Doing the rough math, that’s an incredible 1.4 parking tickets a year for two years for every man, woman and child in the city.
Maybe that explains why a car spotted traveling through Eagle Rock recently sported a bumper sticker that read simply: “Pasadena Parking Sucks.”
While there is little debate about that regrettable fact, anyone who’s ever visited Pasadena shouldn’t think for a minute that the Crown City is alone in this regard.
Writing on the MSNBC blog, The Red Tape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan notes parking has become a multimillion-dollar industry unto itself, and the time has long passed since a person living in a moderately large city could avoid getting parking tickets just by sheer luck.
“Parking meters and meter maids have become less forgiving. Around the country, cash-strapped municipalities are turning to what’s sometimes called a ‘curb tax’ to shore up weak balance sheets,” Sullivan notes. “Cities are raising ticket prices, hiring more citation officers, turning to gimmicky technologies, even selling their parking systems and enforcement to the highest bidder, all in a desperate effort to shrink budget gap.”
“There’s no doubt about it. Virtually every city has hired more ticket agents,” adds Glen Bolofsky, founder of ticket-beating site parkingticket.com.
In New York, for instance, officials raked in an unbelievable $600 million in parking ticket revenue in 2009, double the amount of 2002. Chicago, according to Sullivan, leased its entire parking operation to a private company, paying $1 billion up front in exchange for 75 years worth of parking revenue. Atlanta announced it was outsourcing its parking enforcement to Duncan Solutions Inc. of Milwaukee, which has promised to make that city $5.5 million in parking fines — up from $2 million last year. In Washington, D.C., city officials are equipping street sweepers with cameras that take pictures of vehicles in their path in hopes of raising an extra $2 million. Sacramento city officials added $8 to every parking ticket in order to raise $1.5 million, Sullivan explains.
The city of Portland, Ore., according to a press release issued last fall, increased all of its parking fines by $10, and several others by much more than that, to net $500,000.
“We do not put fines in place to make money,” said Susan D. Keil, director of that city’s Transportation Bureau. “We put fines in place to change behavior. Our goal is to have fine amounts sufficient to cause some deterrence from ignoring the law.”
Easy money
That isn’t exactly what former Glendale Police Chief Randy Adams told that community’s City Council last April, when Glendale raised by 10 percent most of its fees and fines associated with parking. Parking fines here were already lower than Pasadena’s, so Adams, who has since retired, wrote in his April 21 report that not only would a “bail” increase bring the city into line with a Vehicle Code requirement for countywide uniformity of parking fines, but also generate “necessary revenue.” In other words, parking fines are easy money, so hike those fees and take that money, which the council did after Adams gave his report.
Pasadena, where an expired meter ticket costs $39.50 (up from $36 last year, and not including an extra $3 fee attached by the county to municipal parking tickets), also makes no bones about fining people for violating its parking rules. Here, non-sworn security officers dressed in black uniforms and working for a private company — Inter-Con Security Systems, which has a less than sterling record of enforcing Pasadena’s draconian and poorly written parking laws, and has been roundly criticized by the city’s top business and elected leaders — ride around on bicycles up to 24 hours a day issuing tickets. Any wrong they might commit seems forgivable, considering how much money now omnipresent parking meters and parking fines rake in, which in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 totaled $5.8 million and $5.3 million, respectively, according to city records obtained by the Pasadena Weekly through a Public Records Act request. That’s as much as the city of Atlanta — with a population of roughly 538,000.
Parking meter money citywide totaled more than $2.6 million in fiscal year 2008, but $2.2 million in collection and maintenance expenses left the city with $467,115.59. The next year saw a nearly $10,000 drop in revenue, with meters bringing the city $457,941.09, according to city records.
Back in June, with only City Councilwoman Margaret McAustin objecting, the council renewed a nearly $1.9 million three-year contract with Pasadena-based Inter-Con, which had come under fire the previous two years for writing inaccurate tickets, prompting a host of complaints from some pretty ticked-off people.
Others who were not at all pleased with Inter-Con’s performance included McAustin’s District 2 predecessor, former Councilman and current Chamber of Commerce CEO and President Paul Little, longtime restaurateur Michael Hawkins and Steve Mulheim, head of the Old Pasadena Management Association. Little urged the council in June to delay voting on the contract with Inter-Con and look elsewhere, but to no avail.
“Complaints continue about the enforcement practices of Inter-Con Security. Most recently I heard of an Inter-Con employee trying to ticket cars that were waiting to be valet parked at one of our better restaurants,” Little wrote at the time.
“I personally witnessed the incident Paul mentions at the restaurant,” wrote Hawkins, himself the owner of Green Street Restaurant on Shoppers Lane, located just off South Lake Avenue, another trendy shopping area where meters have been installed.
Mulheim didn’t have a personal experience to relate, but he did complain about being left out of the decision-making process used to select Inter-Con, and wrote that he has received “consistent and constant complaints concerning aggressive enforcement and rude, and often disrespectful behavior by enforcement officers.”
The council went ahead and approved the contract, with McAustin opposed and Council members Jacque Robinson and Victor Gordo absent. However, this was not the first time Inter-Con had been criticized.
Back in 2007 and 2008, several people complained to the Weekly about receiving tickets that were issued in error. But $5.3 million, the amount Inter-Con took in on tickets for the city last year, and the $6.2 million it is expected to collect in fines and meter fees by the end of this fiscal year, is a lot of money for local officials to turn up their noses at.
By June 2009, it appeared as though regular meetings between city officials and Inter-Con managers, better complaint tracking and requirements for photographic evidence to back up several types of citations had significantly improved things. And Inter-Con, despite complaints by the city’s top business leaders, eventually won the contract, mainly because local companies receive extra points in the competitive bidding process. Otherwise, they would have lost to a company from Virginia, whose bid was a half-million dollars less than Inter-Con’s.
If nothing else, Inter-Con parking agents are busy. In July through December 2007, 1,339 of 99,276 citations issued by parking officers, about 1.3 percent, were dismissed as unfounded, former PW Deputy Editor Joe Piasecki found. During that same period the following year — immediately following orders to improve — 102,505 citations were issued and 1,406 of those were dismissed, again about 1.3 percent.
No wonder the city is the subject of such nasty bumper stickers. That’s a markedly tougher approach than that of Glendale, which has nearly 60,000 more people than Pasadena but only issued about 86,000 parking citations in 2009, with a take of nearly $4 million projected for this fiscal year, including the $350,000 extra dollars expected from increased parking fines. Today, with the council-approved 10 percent increase in all fines, Glendale’s parking “bails,” as Chief Adams called them, are now on a par with Pasadena’s.
Never coming back
Former Pasadena Parking Manager Bill Bortfeld told the council back in June that it was eventually determined that three out of five of those citizen parking ticket complaints were actually about rules and regulations written by the city.
“In almost every case,” City Manager Michael Beck told the council, “it was the rules we had set up as a city and asked them to implement that were creating some of the challenges, and not Inter-Con as an organization.” That’s easy enough to believe. Show a city parking sign to five people and chances are you will get five interpretations of what it actually means.
But problems with Inter-Con continue, Little said a few weeks ago. For instance, a person complained to him after he was ticketed for stopping on Colorado Boulevard to pick up a friend on Jan. 8, one day after the BCS college championship football game between National Champions Alabama and the Texas Longhorns.
“They don’t get as many complaints as they did before, but we still hear about it,” Little said. “One thing we really can’t afford is for Pasadena to get a reputation as being in any way unfriendly to visitors who want to come here and spend money. I hate getting letters from people saying I am never coming back to Pasadena. And we get those as a result of the way people have been treated by these officers, or the circumstances under which they are getting ticketed.”
Inter-Con spokesman John McOsker, who only started with the company this year, said he was unaware of any complaints. McOsker also dispelled a widely circulating suspicion that Inter-Con agents are ordered to fill parking ticket quotas.
“There’s no quota, and there has been no direction for us to increase ticket writing,” said McOsker. “We have not received any direction from the city of Pasadena to do anything inconsistent with the law, certainly. We have received only direction consistent with the law to ensure we are fairly enforcing parking. We’ve actually gotten some direction in some instances to be lenient in parking enforcement.
“We’ve not, quite frankly, gotten feedback from either the public or the city of Pasadena that there is any of the activity you’ve described,” he said. If that were the case, “I would have every expectation that would be communicated to us because they have been very communicative in terms sharing with us how that relationship is working out. If that type of information was coming in any pattern, we have every confidence that would be relayed to us and we would be given some direction on what to do.”
But other questions remain unanswered. One is how many other visitors to Pasadena, people just looking for a place to eat, have fun and spend money on a busy Friday night (and if you’ve noticed, Friday nights aren’t all that busy anymore), have been pounced upon by one of these Inter-Con agents “just doing their jobs” on behalf of the city?
An even more important question, though, is how many of the thoroughly disgusted recipients of these tickets never came back to town because of these experiences, which are a fairly frequent occurrence in trendy and pricey Old Pasadena? For what it’s worth, Little even said in his letter to the council back in June that another unidentified man vowed never to return here after receiving a ticket at a meter that was just then expiring.
Beat the clock
As crazy as it sounds, it appears city leaders are actually depending on the very people they punish to return and continue spending money at our cute and expensive shops, restaurants and boutiques. Unfortunately, as illustrated by the people who complained to Little, life doesn’t work that way. Common sense alone tells us that this type of heavy-handed, overly punitive parking enforcement only drives people away.
So, in essence, it would seem that these well-paid and perhaps even well-meaning hired guns — taking their orders from civic leaders apparently incapable of writing clear, understandable instructions — are conceivably hurting every business in Pasadena because out-of-town visitors won’t visit their now-struggling shops due to our misunderstood and overly enforced parking laws.
Pasadena business leaders and elected officials clearly know that the now-infamous parking situation here has compelled many folks to spend their hard-earned money elsewhere, unless they all failed to read the missives from Little, Hawkins and Mulheim, which is unlikely. And who could blame these angry and skittish former customers, considering the high probability of getting a parking ticket while having dinner or shopping in Pasadena?
It’s hard to quantify exactly, but if a ticket for $45 is issued to one person who might spend three or four times that amount while in town, and then that person pays that ticket without challenging it but never comes back, aren’t the city
and its merchants losing out on a lot of dough?
The reality is enforcement of parking laws is a money-generating industry unto itself and a fact of life in Pasadena, just as it is in every large and mid-sized city in America. But, said an ever optimistic Mayor Bill Bogaard, “I think things are getting better.”
Bogaard was aware of the concerns expressed by Little and the other business leaders, and he said “we certainly looked at the style of service that they provided and whether they were too rigid or too quick to issue tickets.” But, said the mayor, who voted to approve the contract with Inter-Con, “The city manager has brought I think a more, well, a gentler style of enforcement of our parking laws. They have to be enforced. But we don’t think the ticket issuer should be standing by waiting for the clock to run out.”
(Next week: Overnight Parking.)
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Comments
In California, no recipient of a parking ticket has any right to judicial due process according to California .VEHICLE CODE SECTION 40200-40230, especially as interpreted by Los Angeles County's Parking Enforcement Detail.
The reason for this is because, before it even grants a preliminary hearing for any parking citation issued by one of their rent-a-cop thugs, the private corporate administrators of LA County's Parking Detail require of all ticket recipients that they first must surrender the product of a guilty plea before they will even consider scheduling their own, extra-constitutional show-trial of administrative review. If a person ever refuses to surrender a penalty assessment before any court has convicted him, the clerk of California's Superior Courthouse will summarily assume a judical cloak and refuse to process any attempt to appeal a citation.
In the meantime, ANY ticket recipient who still insists on taking the matter before a real judicial authority by surrendering the penalty assessment, is yet not allowed, by this section of the vehicle code, to legally characterize himself before a judge as an innocent defendant accused of a parking violation. According to the rules used by the County, all vehicle owners receiving a citation are processed from the get-go as guilty contestants. And since we all know that surrendering a penalty assessment is tantamount to a guilty plea, All the County need ever do if a citation ever actually reaches the judicial stage of aborted due process is to produce a contestant's formal surrender notice of the penalty assessment in order to confirm any official lack of his innocence status.
A functionally perfect Catch 22.
As a consequence, for parking issues at least, as far as the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is concerned, due process is a dead and buried issue. Parking enforcement for the City of Pasadena is similarly enforced.
But boy, does the money roll in!
DanD
posted by DanD on 3/22/10 @ 07:44 p.m.
It is pretty simple really, just pay the meter and obey the laws and you will not get a ticket.
posted by Seriously? on 3/24/10 @ 08:34 p.m.
And Dan, that is not the way the hearing process in Pasadena works. Please do your research.
posted by Seriously? on 3/24/10 @ 08:36 p.m.
As I stated before...
I use to work for Inter-con as a parking enforcement office in Pasadena, they (inter-con) would always say that we needed to be more productive, meaning more cititations. So its little wonder why the Parking enforcement officers are forced to provide such bad service to the community. Inter-con is also very abusive to its employees and will term one out for minor infractions.
posted by DerSturmWulf on 4/12/10 @ 12:15 p.m.
Kevin;
Before I make a more indepth assessment of your article later, I will right now offer this observation:
You obviously haven't performed (because of limits on time, manpower, and money) any independent review of all the information provided in your article, but instead have merely reproduced the math offered to you on a government/contractor corporate silver platter. In your article you have stated:
"If nothing else, Inter-Con parking agents are busy. In July through December 2007, 1,339 of 99,276 citations issued by parking officers, about 1.3 percent, were dismissed as unfounded, former PW Deputy Editor Joe Piasecki found. During that same period the following year — immediately following orders to improve — 102,505 citations were issued and 1,406 of those were dismissed, again about 1.3 percent."
Now, what you need to do is go over to Cal-Tech, or some other reputable institution of higher learning, and get one of their professors of statistics to assess what the odds are of this particular statistical circumstance happening two years in a row.
Essentially, this information you have been given is prima facie evidence that the number of tickets actually being written, and the amounts of punitive tax revenue allegedly collected from the public by these quasi-rent-a-cop organizations are complete fantasies.
I have no doubt whatsoever that this Inter-Con(fidence) extortion-racket agency is skimming millions, if not tens-of-millions, of dollars off the top -- or perhaps -- is even perpetrating against the public pocketbook, some kind of Bernie Madoff Punitive Citation Ripoff Mill.
The most important aspect that lets this government sponsored ripoff work so well is that CALIFORNIA VEHICLE CODE SECTION 40200-40230 actually prohibits the California judiciary from effectively performing any "Quality Control" checks-and-balances oversight of these California law enforcement-contracted, private-corporate, rogue parking enforcement extortion rackets. The ultimate consequence? They proliferate.
DanD