17 February 2011, 2:02 pm
In the five months since 75-cents-an-hour parking began in downtown Tacoma, downtown business owners say, enforcement officers are too aggressive and their customers are feeling targeted.
“If you’re one minute late, you got a ticket. Run in to get quarters, you got a ticket. I went in to get a roll of quarters and came out and had a ticket. In literally 20 seconds,” said Dave Meconi, owner of Meconi’s Tacoma Pub & Eatery at 709 Pacific Ave. “It’s not about 75 cents anymore, it’s about 25 bucks.”
Since the beginning of the year, citations have increased fourfold compared with the last two months of 2010, city data show. Parking officers wrote 4,063 tickets in January, compared with 1,059 in December and 1,621 in November. But it’s the other months, not January, that are the anomaly, parking manager David Carr said Wednesday.
“Enforcement hasn’t really been regular since pay stations were installed” in September, Carr said. The data show a brief spike in citations in the first two weeks of October, to levels similar to January, but the rest of the year was low on tickets and high on warnings.
“At the first of the year, we went to regular patrol. We’re doing the same relative number of warnings and citations,” he said. “There’s a different reaction to a citation and a warning.”
Money from the pay stations and citations goes into a designated parking fund. Carr said he doesn’t yet know how much the city has collected from citations. He said he’s been working with the municipal court since November to get that information. He also said the city doesn’t track the value of the citations it issues, even though it can.
“I don’t want to look at that,” he said. And based on a robust discussion about discretion in enforcement two weeks ago at a meeting of the citizen commission charged with advising the city on the paid-parking system, Carr said they’ve made some changes in the way parking officers rotate through downtown.
“Can we tune the system to better meet the rhythm, the harmony of downtown? Yeah, we can, and we’re going to do that. We’re going to find that sweet spot,” Carr said.
RANGE OF TICKETS
Free parking ended Sept. 20, when about 160 pay stations were installed in the downtown core with the goal of one open spot for every seven. The idea is to get downtown employees to park off the street so visitors, clients and shoppers can quickly find a spot.
A citizen commission designed the system, including deciding on a two-hour limit on the same block. That commission meets twice a month and advises the city manager and parking staff members on tweaks to the system. The biggest change they’ve made was turning off the pay stations along Market Street from South 11th to South 21st streets in December after vacancy rates soared and local businesses were hurt.
Of the dozen business owners interviewed by The News Tribune, almost all were happy with the way paid parking had created more spaces for their customers. But they’re seeing customers get tickets not just for paid-parking-related violations, which are $15-$25 tickets, but for things such as expired car tabs and missing license plates.
Those tickets are much more expensive. Expired car tabs can be $86 or $171, depending on how out-of-date they are, and missing plates are $86.
The business owners say parking officers aren’t showing any discretion, and that creates the perception among customers that they’re more likely to get a ticket if they patronize businesses downtown.
“The story was this was supposed to help business, not hurt it, and they’re deterring business because of their aggressiveness,” said Meconi, who acknowledges he isn’t a fan of the pay stations but says he accepts they’re here to stay. “They’re giving out tickets for no front license plates in the window, when they’re having lunch in my place.”
Madison Leago owns Vamp Salon and Spa at 1117 Broadway, across from Varsity Grill, whose owners have tweeted their concerns over parking enforcement. Leago said she was worried about limited street parking when she was deciding whether to lease the space last fall, but the building owner convinced her that paid parking would create the open spots she needed. She opened in November.
“I was concerned about not having enough parking because you will lose clients that way,” she said. “So I have spaces, but I’m losing clients because they’re getting tickets.” Leago said officers write tickets just a few minutes after a sticker expires, or for things that have nothing to do with paid parking.
BY THE NUMBERS
The data show that in January, parking officers wrote 2,524 tickets for paid-parking violations, up from 134 in December. At the same time, they wrote 209 tickets for expired car tabs, 54 more than the month before; and 158 tickets for improper placement of front wheels to the curb, more than double the previous month’s total. That’s a $35 infraction.
Carr said parking officers are responsible for 85 nonmoving violations, and only three of them are related to paid parking. But the majority of his enforcement zones, and therefore his staff, focuses on downtown because that’s what the task force wanted, he said. With paid parking came new equipment that allows officers to be more efficient, and the time stamps on the stickers help speed things up, too.
Several business owners said they believe some officers lie in wait for stickers to expire.
“They’re not instructed to do that,” Carr said. “In fact, the conversation this week was: If it’s a minute or two, keep walking. The point isn’t to get every single one, the point is to cover your route. If you’re waiting here for three minutes, dwelling, you’re missing three or four over here. The policy is you continue on your route. If someone just expired, you can give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Carr acknowledged not every officer is on board.
“That hasn’t gotten traction with everybody yet, but we’ve had that discussion and will continue to,” he said.
Carr, who started the job nine months ago, said he’s trying to create a more effective, efficient parking division. He encourages the officers to do minimal enforcement, but not to be selective.
“If we do our jobs as best as we can, it’s perceived negatively,” Carr said. “Encouraging my people not to be productive, in a government agency and an enforcement agency, is not something I really want to encourage. So how do I go to them and say, I want you to back off?”
Jerry Henness owns Adventure Graphics on Court A and South 7th Street. He said he’s indifferent to paid parking, but two tickets for missing license plates have caused two people to no longer come to his office.
Recently he was in Meconi’s and saw a couple come in.
They got a ticket while they were looking for a seat. They were from Bremerton, Henness said. They came for the local flavor.
Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/02/17/1548470/downtown-dust-up.html#ixzz1EG64bHAk
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