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| Credit: www.citywatch.com |
GELFAND’S WORLD-It was a totally chickensh-t parking ticket, and it cost me $80. Lots of us have gotten tickets that weren't kosher, and now I'd like to explain how we can take the law into our own hands -- legally -- and change the rules. How we do that is actually easy. We just need a quick 62,000 signatures on a petition for something called an initiative, and we'll get our streets back.
Right now, I'd like to take you on a tour of what's wrong with the current system, including the fact that the appeal you innocently sent to the parking authorities is actually handled by a private company that takes ninety million dollars from the city. I'm not kidding -- follow a little further down and I'll give you the city's own website where you can look it up.
So, let's use my ticket as an example. I parked in front of the music center along with about a dozen other cars one nice Saturday afternoon to see a show. I was doing what the city fathers keep saying they want us to do -- spend money. It will be a long time before I make that mistake again.
So anyway, there was a sign on a poll basically saying I could park there. What I missed was the other sign, way up near the tippy top, saying I couldn't park there after 4 pm. Actually the sign at the tippy top was more like the third or fourth sign on that particular poll. There were that many of them and they all said different things.
Like I said, half a dozen or a dozen other people found their own tickets after we got out of the show. I actually tried to contest mine. This is where you learn how grossly the system is rigged against the honest person.
I looked at the ticket and started looking at the signs. Whoa. The one at the top made me an illegal parker after 4 pm. You wouldn't have known it by looking at any of the other signs, lower on that poll.
You really had to look hard, and know what you were looking for. So I filled out the paperwork and sent it to the requisite address, and . . . nothing. Not a peep from the city fathers except to demand that I pay the fine in advance. I did. Five months went by. I finally tried calling a government office. Somebody promised to get back to me. Eventually, within a day or two of six months, I got a desultory letter telling me that the ticket was technically lawful. Apparently there is nothing in the law that says the government has to handle your appeal in any particular amount of time.
So I took the next step, which was to ask for a personal hearing, where I could present my argument that a parking sign has to be clear in its meaning rather than vague and ambiguous. I eventually got a letter back from the government telling me that I had missed the 21 day deadline for filing the second appeal. Hmm. The government gets six months, or whatever it takes them, but for me, not so much. Six months OK for them. Three weeks and a day not so OK for me.
That's the way the system works. Chicken litter tickets, a system that is rigged against the motorist, and fines that have been jacked up into the stratosphere. And why are parking fines so high? To make our streets navigable? No, it's not because it's what it takes to keep traffic moving and parking available. As insiders (and even not so insiders) have pointed out, some members of the previous City Council and the former mayor basically told the city how much money it had to make on parking tickets and parking meters, and the City Council acted accordingly.
The problem for the City Council and the mayor is that they have gotten themselves trapped. The city makes well over a hundred million dollars a year on parking control -- by now the number is half way to two hundred million -- and they don't know how to reduce their rate of plunder without adding to the budget shortfall.
But for the residents of the city and our visitors, we ought to set all of that aside and just fix the problem. And it's probably not difficult to do so.
Read the full story: www.citywatchla.com
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