Phantom Parking Tickets : Beverly Hills Is Costly Even if You Don’t Visit

When former Siskiyou Daily News owner Edgar J. Foss Sr. received a Beverly Hills Municipal Court citation accusing him of parking illegally on Rexford Drive at 4:36 a.m. last Nov. 6, he was startled, to say the least.

For one thing, the 64-year-old former publisher insisted, he was not out roaming around at that hour.

For another, he was 650 miles from Beverly Hills, at home in Montague near the extreme Northern California town of Yreka. “In fact,” he said, “I’ve never been to Beverly Hills, and I’m sure as hell not going there now.”

What puzzled Foss was that the citation listed his personalized license plate--SD NEWS--and correctly described his car as a “white Chev.” That, he concluded, was “almost too much for coincidence.”

He did not know if he was the victim of some “rip-off by remote control” or if some incredibly sophisticated “cheap crook” had duplicated his car and license plate while prowling wealthy Southern California neighborhoods at night.

When he was unable to get anything in response to his letter of objection other than a standard form directing him to pay $13 within 30 days or appear in court, he decided to send in the money under protest. He also sent court officials a copy of the hot editorial he wrote for his old newspaper.

He still did not hear from Beverly Hills Municipal Court, but he did hear from Gil Davies, contracting officer for Klamath National Forest, headquartered in Yreka. It seemed that two of Davies’ employees had also received citations from Beverly Hills and neither had been there at the time.

In fact, one of them, clerk-typist Charlotte Hammer, said that like Foss she has never been to Beverly Hills. She went further than that: On July 20, 1984, the date the Beverly Hills citation said her 1981 yellow Ford Escort was illegally parked there, she was in Siskiyou General Hospital undergoing hip surgery. She has the bill to prove it.

Her car did not go anywhere without her, she is certain--and definitely not to Beverly Hills.

She also said she could get no personalized response from the Beverly Hills court to her certified letter of protest. All she got was the receipt showing her letter reached the court.

She got a subsequent notice from the court, directing her to pay $36 or appear in court. That was when her boss, Davies, wrote a letter to the court explaining the situation again. “We didn’t hear another thing from them,” he said. “That was the end of it.”

Another of Davies’ employees, procurement clerk Lorelei Super, who lives in the same tiny community of Montague where Foss lives, also received a citation for a supposedly overdue Beverly Hills parking ticket. She had not been there either.

That coincidence aside, however, Beverly Hills Municipal Court Administrator Stan Seidler was ready to explain.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “it happens too frequently, and it is human error. We get letters from people back East, in the Midwest . . . literally from all over the country.”

What sometimes happens, Seidler said, is that the original ticket written by a police officer and left on the windshield of some offending automobile is “not always extremely clear.” When the ticket is not paid inside the time limit, it goes to a computer firm that processes the subsequent citations to be mailed out.

If the computer operator is off by a single digit or letter, Seidler pointed out, the wrong license number goes to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which then will identify the wrong vehicle and owner.

“Apparently there is a 4% standard of error in the computer data industry,” Seidler said. So even if all police officers wrote clearly, “4% of those citations are going to be wrong. The people doing that work are human. They are entering the same type of information hour after hour after hour.”

Seidler said letters of explanation from wrongly cited vehicle owners go to a traffic judge “and he normally dismisses them.” But he could not explain why neither Foss nor Hammer received responses to their letters.

He promised to see that the person responsible takes a little more care in that regard.

Beverly Hills is not picking on Yreka and environs intentionally, he contended. “We’re not just drawing names out of a hat. I’ll say that.”

Los Angeles threatens holders of unpaid parking tickets with the “Denver boot.” Story on Page 3.