Tickets Scare Customers, Merchants Say : San Fernando Eases Up on Parking

In response to merchant complaints that ticketing of parked cars at the San Fernando Mall is scaring away customers, city officials have told traffic patrols to issue fewer tickets during the holidays.

Acting San Fernando Police Chief Don Rivetti said that this week he directed the department’s eight community service officers, civilian employees who enforce the city’s parking code, to “exercise a lot more discretion in enforcing the parking regulations in the area.”

“Any retail area during the Christmas period experiences a lot higher density of vehicles and traffic,” Rivetti said Thursday. “We’re sensitive to that.”

Said City Administrator Donald Penman: “We want to maintain the holiday mood.”

On Monday night, several merchants at the outdoor mall complained to the City Council that they were losing business because customers were afraid of getting parking tickets.

‘A Slow Season’

“It’s a problem that happens sporadically,” clothing store owner Gloria Friedman said later. “This has been a slow season for us. I sure don’t need my customers to get scared any more.”

“Customers will want to stop in for a minute, and they’ll get a ticket,” said Josie Villegas, a saleswoman at Dino’s Discount Outlet, a variety store. Because of insufficient parking, the store “loses maybe one out of three customers,” she said.

The uncovered mall, stretching over three blocks on San Fernando Road between Mission Boulevard and Chatsworth Drive, has about 1,800 parking spaces, Penman said. These include 193 metered spaces and 1,400 spaces in free public lots.

Of the about 1,700 parking tickets issued in the city each month, “probably the majority are in the mall area,” Rivetti said.

Serious Problems Stressed

In telling the traffic patrols to show restraint, Penman said, officials are “trying to stress to community service officers that our goal is to address more serious parking problems, and that our schedule should reflect a reasonable amount of coverage, not too much coverage.”

Rivetti said the mall has not been targeted for ticketing and that there are no quotas requiring community service officers to write a certain number of tickets.

“We are trying to provide an equal enforcement program throughout the city,” he said. “We do instruct our community service officers not to be waiting for meters to expire.”

The acting police chief also noted that, “If someone parks all day long and doesn’t get a ticket, then we get complaints that there’s not enough enforcement.”

Besides addressing the enforcement issue, the city is looking for ways of increasing parking spaces at the mall to promote downtown business, Penman said.

In January, the city responded to merchant complaints about the inadequacy of mall-area parking by extending the time limit at meters and parking lots, Penman said. The limit on the mall meters was changed from one hour to two hours, and shoppers were permitted to park in the public lots for three hours instead of two.