Shift Expected to Bring Rise in Parking Tickets

The likelihood of getting a parking ticket in the San Fernando Valley will increase sharply starting next month if the city’s Department of Transportation has its way.

About 50 civilians who enforce parking regulations for the Los Angeles Police Department are scheduled to move by early April from their operating base in Van Nuys to a facility operated by the transportation department. The move is part of a citywide transfer of all parking enforcement responsibilities, including the impounding of cars and monitoring of parking meters, from the Police Department to the transportation department.

Transportation department officials said the move is expected to increase the number of citations issued to motorists who park illegally, with the goal of doubling the income to the city from the citations. Parking citations now bring in about $25 million a year to the city. In 1984, 143,199 citations were issued in the Valley.

“Our anticipated results from this move will be an improved traffic flow in the Valley, an increasing of on-street parking, and generally an improved quality of life,” said Robert Yates, the transportation department’s parking administrator.

But money also figures highly in the city’s plans. Yates said the civilian traffic monitors will be able to enforce parking regulations more vigorously because they will be freed of some of their current duties.

The civilian monitors now impound abandoned cars, recover stolen vehicles, direct traffic at intersections and supervise the elementary school crossing-guard program. Under the transportation department, the monitors will concentrate on parking violations and police will play a more active role in investigating the theft of cars.

City officials also are considering turning over the crossing-guard program to private firms.

The shift is designed to enable the Police Department to handle more crime reports by freeing it from handling complaints about illegally parked cars.

The civilian personnel will move to the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. The area they patrol will continue to include all city property north of Mulholland Drive, extending west as far as Calabasas.

Yates said the department will concentrate on discouraging motorists from parking in preferential parking areas in residential neighborhoods and enforcing no-parking regulations along clogged main arteries such as Ventura Boulevard and Sherman Way in an effort to ease the traffic during rush hours.

Yates said the department will also crack down on large trucks parked in residential neighborhoods and unauthorized cars parked in spaces reserved for the handicapped.

Police initially complained about losing the civilian monitors, who assist them in investigations and clerical duties dealing with abandoned or stolen vehicles. The city has agreed, however, to replace them with other civilians or with sworn officers, although no specific plan has been completed.

Capt. Al Fried, chief of the Valley Traffic Division, said that, except for the promised step-up in enforcement of parking regulations, “nothing really is going to change” from the motorist’s point of view.

“This will have no impact on the crime efforts of police,” Fried said. “Instead of these parking officers reporting to me, they will report to someone in the transportation department. But they will have the same uniforms, the same radios and the same equipment.”

Transportation department officials, however, said they hope the look of their enforcers will be quite different in three years. The most dramatic change is expected to be a switch from the three-wheeled motorcycles now used by parking officers to new subcompact automobiles. Department officials also plan to add their own communications and computer systems for enforcement.

“We’re in the process of implementing a parking management program in six areas of the city, which will include analysis . . . of on-street parking violations, installation and administration of parking meters, and collection of revenue from those meters,” Yates said.

“Parking problems became critical in places such as Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C, and we wanted to get in on the ground level before we started having critical problems here,” Yates said. “We are going to be more aggressive, and motorists are just going to have to be more careful.”