Parking Law Policing Can Take Its Toll

If you live or work in crowded Newport Beach, you play the parking game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And, when no one’s looking, sometimes you cheat.

After all, who cares if you park in a red zone just long enough to get cash from an automatic teller machine? Kathy Lux does. So does David Pollex. It’s their job.

In a town with too many cars and too few parking spaces, it’s not a job for the humorless, the timid or the unforgiving.

“I’ve had guys say, ‘I hope I see you after work,’ or, ‘I wish I had a gun,’ ” Pollex said. “It’s amazing how upset people can get over a traffic ticket. People act as if it’s your fault that they parked illegally.”

In 1988, police wrote 120,258 tickets for illegal parking, according to Police Sgt. Bob Oakley. Through September of this year, they had issued 74,297 such citations.

It takes a toll, say the parking officers.

Lux said the verbal abuse can be overwhelming, and some fellow workers have quit over it. Once, a few years ago, she said a female officer quit when she was physically battered by a woman enraged over a ticket.

Sometimes abusive drivers feel guilty later for their behavior, the officers said.

“I got a letter from a guy who (had) yelled at me up one side and down the other,” Lux said. The man apologized, saying that getting the ticket had been the culmination of a bad day.

Lux said she understands. “We’re normal people, we have bad days too.”

At the other end of the spectrum are the comedians.

“If I hear ‘Lovely Rita, Meter Maid’ one more time--or, ‘Is your name Rita?’ ” Lux said, referring to the Beatles tune of the late 1960s. “That’s common. Sometimes guys break into full song.”

Often, people see only a uniform and not the person, say the meter readers. Karen Weigand, a former parking officer who now supervises the division, said it happened more than once that a man who had yelled invectives at her in the morning struck up a friendly conversation with her in a bar that evening.

“They say, ‘Where do I know you from,’ or, ‘Did we go to high school together?’ ” Weigand said.

Misconceptions abound concerning how parking enforcement officers do their jobs, Pollex said. For example, “we don’t have binoculars in our cars and wait for the thing to pop up on the meter.”

Officers also won’t chase cars that speed away to avoid a parking ticket. Aside from safety, Lux has another consideration: “I’m in heels. . . . I’m not running for anything.”

Besides, violators who flee get the ticket in the mail instead. “Usually, you’re telling them that with exhaust in your face,” Lux said.

Another misconception is that parking officers know whose car they’re ticketing.

Lux recently wrote a ticket for an expired meter on a Rolls-Royce parked on 15th Street on the Balboa Peninsula. She discovered that it belonged to Reggie Jackson “when he came out with his entourage.”

The officers say they have heard all the excuses--at least twice.

“It’s always an emergency,” Pollex said. “Somebody’s ‘on their deathbed,’ ” he said.

Some local residents take offense when they get a ticket, the officers said.

“Why don’t you ticket the tourists?” and “My taxes pay your salary” are common refrains for some, the officers said.

Despite the whining and the abuse, the officers say they enjoy the job.

“You hear ‘Get a real job’ a lot, but this is fun,” Lux said. “I wouldn’t trade jobs for the world. You get to work outside and meet people. You’re free to sit down with people who want to talk to you.”