If the meter’s broken, don’t fix it, ticket

On a pleasant September day, a Los Angeles resident named Mariko Van Kampen visited the Museum of Natural History.

She was lucky enough to find a parking spot on Exposition Boulevard. The meter said there were seven minutes remaining, and Van Kampen, to avoid a ticket, began feeding it coins.

If you live in Los Angeles, have visited Los Angeles, or know someone who has lived in or visited Los Angeles, then you probably know what happened next.

The first two coins registered, but the meter refused to acknowledge some of the subsequent coins. Having tried to pay for an adequate amount of time, Van Kampen covered the meter with a bag and attached a handwritten note:

“METER IS OUT OF ORDER. Stole 3 quarters (accepted 4). Should have time till 1:15.”

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How much was the ticket?

Van Kampen was hit with a $40 citation for parking at an expired meter.

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But there’s more, right?

Six days later, Van Kampen encountered another broken meter in a public parking lot on Larchmont Boulevard in Hancock Park. This time she put seven coins in, but only five registered.

Instead of doing what a reasonable person or Jack Nicholson might -- take a five iron to the offending meter -- Van Kampen went home and wrote a letter to the city.

“I do not intend to pay the enclosed citation and, in fact, feel the city should pay me back the $1.05 it owes me for the unregistered coins deposited in the 2 offending meters this past week,” she wrote.

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And how’d that go?

She’s still out the $1.05, and her appeal of the ticket was denied last week. But the city offered her the chance to pay $25 to again appeal.

“I’m so mad, there’s steam coming out of my ears,” Van Kampen said in a phone message as a little wisp of white smoke seemed to puff from my phone receiver.

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Aren’t the city’s parking meters known for being impenetrable instruments of time measurement?

Not according to city reports.

The city has about 42,000 digital parking meters. They’re all the same model -- the Eagle Duncan 2000 -- and were installed in the late 1990s.

In 1999, KCBS-TV Channel 2 found that about 10% of those meters weren’t working.

Another report filed by the city’s transportation agency last year revealed that most of the city’s digital meters were near the end of their lifespan and an unspecified number weren’t working.

The report included this nugget:

“The department continually faces problems insuring the security of parking meter revenues due to compromises of meter mechanisms as well as mechanical locking devices.”

The problem: There are more than 1,000 variations of keys that unlock various city meters.

“These keys can be lost, stolen, worn or duplicated,” the report states. “It has become clear that mechanical locking devices are limited in their ability to control unauthorized entry into our parking meter vaults.”

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Translation please?

According to our bureaucrat-to-English dictionary, the city is ticketing people for parking at broken meters, many of which were broken by thieves.

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And what does the city’s parking guru, Amir Fedadi, say?

Fedadi is new on the job and acknowledges that somewhere in the ballpark of 10% of the city’s meters are broken at any given time. Yes, that’s the same percentage as KCBS reported in 1999.

But hope remains. Fedadi said the city next year will begin experimenting with pay stations -- the kind seen in many other large cities -- that will replace meters in some parts of town and allow motorists to pay for parking with credit cards.

The city, too, hopes to explore allowing people to pay for time on their meter via their phones -- as they can in San Francisco.

“We know there are problems, and we’re working diligently to provide solutions,” Fedadi said. “It’s just that there were some changes in leadership in the city” and the Department of Transportation.

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So what is the best way to avoid going to war with City Hall over being cited for parking at a broken meter?

If you park at a meter that is broken and reads “failed” you will not be ticketed, officials say.

If, like Van Kampen, you park at a meter that eats your coins but doesn’t provide sufficient time, then you run the risk of being ticketed if the meter expires. However, if you call the city’s broken meter hotline at (877) 215-3958 and report the offending meter, then you will probably be able to appeal your ticket.

Yes, it’s so, so cruel. But Los Angeles and other cities have such rules to prevent people from breaking meters in order to park for free.

If you still want to know more about meters, the city provides a fascinating history of the devices at www.lacity.org/LADOT. Follow the link from the “topics and tales” page.

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Anything happen interesting this year in City Hall, now that the City Council has shut down until January?

Take a deep breath:

The mayor is headed to appeals court to preserve his school control plan, the trash pickup fee was raised for homeowners to pay for more police, and labor leader Martin Ludlow -- a former council member -- lost his job after running afoul of federal labor laws.

There’s more.

The city committed to building six garbage-munching machines around town to replace landfills, term limits were relaxed for the council, voters narrowly defeated a $1-billion affordable housing bond, a hubbub was raised about cleaning up skid row, but it is still skid row, and pols tied themselves in knots over whether to settle a lawsuit by a firefighter who alleged that he was fed dog food by colleagues as part of a racist stunt.

Whew.

And, the council refused to act to rein in ceremonial presentations that force people with business before the city to wait around for hours, after Councilman Tom LaBonge complained about such limits. Check out the chart -- this column’s holiday gift to the city solons.

If the council is going to insist on long-winded proclamations, this column believes the city should return to handing out keys instead of fancy paper proclamations. See the photo.

An aside: LaBonge found a smaller version of a key to Los Angeles in a Salt Lake City antique store a few years ago. The key in the photo, however, couldn’t be located this week, but LaBonge has agreed to help with this column’s quest to find it.

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And what does Council President Eric Garcetti think of the year that passed?

He cited several accomplishments, some obvious -- such as the police hiring plan -- and some surprising.

Garcetti, for example, called it a “cultural sea change” that only four of 127 council meetings began more than 20 minutes late, something he sees as significant for residents.

Garcetti also pointed to the city’s crime dropping to 1950s levels and the fact that there are 15,000 units of both affordable and market-rate housing in the city’s planning pipeline, the highest number in years.

“All these planning tools the city has adopted that seem wonkish are bearing out,” Garcetti said. “There’s a shift in council where we no longer have a prevailing ethic to kill projects.”

As for the easing of term limits, Garcetti said, “now the future seems much more certain. The people” -- the elected officials -- “can go back to the idea of thinking about big ideas” instead of worrying so much about what office they might seek next.

Garcetti said he would like to see the city continue to emphasize improving traffic and transportation in 2007.

“I think that the city needs to finally come up with a master plan for public transit that engages everyone in planning for our future,” he said. “Public transit will never become a mass transit system unless a mass of people feel ownership of it and are at the table helping to plan it.

“It’s the classic Los Angeles question,” he added. “Can we articulate what we’re for rather than what we’re against?”

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Tuesday: What’s Rep. Loretta Sanchez thinking about this holiday season?

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steve.hymon@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Swift City Council action, sometimes

The chart shows how long it took the Los Angeles City Council to vote to put the issue of term limits on the November ballot, versus how long it has taken to adopt new rules to control their own long-winded ceremonial presentations:

Term limits

19 days

Ceremonial presentations

433 days*

*and counting

Source: Los Angeles City Council files