Aggressive parket ticketing and towing to close a city's deficit

[Liberal_in_LA]

http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-26/news/parking-a-fine-mess/

So what to do when, as Professor Thomas Griffith of USC Law School puts it, "we're running out of tricks"? Raise fines and fees: parking tickets coupled with meters that now must be fed well after 6 p.m.; "Denver" boots on cars; tow-away surcharges; littering fines. The beauty is, none of it has to go before L.A. voters.

"In some instances are raising fines rather than going back and raising taxes," says L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine. Fines can even be defended on the basis of guilt — violators don't have an organized constituency.

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In 2008, the City Council voted to raise the penalty for all parking violations by $5. Yet, as L.A. Weekly reported a year ago, the 15 City Council members, who each earn salaries of $178,789 per year, 400 percent of the median L.A. income, and drive free cars filled with free gas, made sure they are exempt from parking tickets.

In late 2008, the council and Villaraigosa doubled to $100 the "vehicle release" surcharge for every poor sucker who gets his or her car towed. The extra revenue from all this is not being earmarked for the upgrading of streets or the relief of congestion. It is poured into the growing budget-deficit hole.

The fine-driven crackdown hasn't played well with some. A contributor to the Spirit of Venice blog recently wrote about walking out of her house to find her car gone. She thought it was stolen, but after spending an hour on the phone, she learned it had been impounded for five unpaid parking tickets. It cost her three days of work and $1,036 to get it back.

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But a fat new fine isn't worth much without the will to enforce it, and every day the city is aggressively ticketing and towing cars in neighborhoods across L.A.

On Ventura Boulevard in Encino, for example, each weekday after 3 p.m., onlookers can watch a city tow-truck driver hook up cars like clockwork just east of Hayvenhurst Avenue. Those being towed — shoppers who parked on Ventura but didn't read the signs carefully enough — beg for a second chance. Unemotionally, a tag team consisting of a traffic officer and a tow-truck driver points to the signs announcing no parking after 3 p.m. The price tag is huge: $394.50, for the $150 ticket, $209.50 in impound fees and $35 "per day" storage — which is charged in full after the first hour.