More change for parking
City Manager’s Office looks at PW’s recommendations to improve local parking
By André Coleman 07/29/2010
Most of the Pasadena Weekly’s ideas for improving the city’s parking system are either in place or are being implemented, but some of those ideas are financially unfeasible or out of the purview of the City Council, according to a memo issued this week by the City Manager’s Office.
One of the 10 requests made in the newspaper’s April 8 editorial has been met, with the hiring in late May of Charles Kindred, a full-time director of the Transportation Department’s parking division, which is expected to take in $6.2 million in revenue for the city next fiscal year. The city had been seeking a permanent chief for that division since the departure of former director Bill Bortfeld last summer.
The memo also indicates the city may explore removing a requirement that residents provide proof of vehicle registration to purchase permits allowing them to park on public streets during day and night hours.
Other recommendations — among them forming a citywide parking commission to oversee revenues and complaints and increase free parking time in city-owned lots — would be up to the City Council to decide. But Transportation Department Director Fred Dock warned in the memo that increasing free parking from 90 minutes to two hours could cost the city between 20 and 50 percent of the revenue that those garages generate. Increasing hours could also result in cutting the jobs of people working in those garages, he wrote.
Another of the paper’s recommendations was to issue warnings to first-time offenders. Dock wrote that agents with Inter-Con Security — the private company that handles parking enforcement for the city — has already started issuing warnings for such violations as parking outside of marked spaces and expired meters. The memo states that the city would have to upgrade the technology it currently uses to give all illegally parked drivers a one-time warning.
Although it is not explained how the procedure currently works without new gadgetry, the city is in the process of upgrading its technology so that money can be added to some parking meters by cell phone, and that expired meters can issue expiration warnings to those numbers.
Dock is on vacation and was not available for comment. Kindred returned a phone call late Tuesday afternoon and said that, since December, 9,083 warnings had been issued for parking outside of the designated space and 12,654 for outdated registration.
The memo states that increasing free time in local garages from 90 minutes to two hours — as well as changing the city’s overnight parking requirements — is within the power of the council.
“I think it would be a good thing to increase free parking,” said Councilwoman Jacque Robinson. “I think most people who go to Old Town are there for more than two hours. If you are there to shop and eat on the weekend, you are spending money. I think parking is a huge impediment everywhere, and increasing the free time could encourage more people to come here and spend money, which could make up for any lost revenue.”
Robinson is not alone in her views.
“They should definitely have more free parking,” said Teddy Bedjakian, owner of Equator restaurant in Hugus Alley. “I pay $2,700 every year in parking credits for spaces that don’t exist.”
The city, Bedjakian said, started charging him for the spaces once he got a liquor license, “and I still don’t have enough spaces,” he said. “A lot of the businesses pay for them, but where are they? Where does that money go? … The city is killing itself with these parking tickets.”
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
Basically, if some agency that wields (either directly or by contract) government authority cites me for violating a civic code, then that agency should be required to indict me by way of America's (and California's) government run system of judicial review.
But as far as the way that both Pasadena AND the County of Los Angeles are concerned, for parking violations (they are no longer considered "infractions"), the City of Pasadena has outsourced the State's authority to punitively tax to a private corporation.
I'd like to know ... where in either the State or National Constitutions is either the legislative or executive branches of government given the power to prohibit the judicial branch from adjudicating this functionally punitive brand of government tort?
DanD