City Addresses Post Office Parking Ticket Problem

Not everybody gets to pitch $1,105 worth of parking tickets into the trash without fear of penalty--but Uncle Sam does.

A Los Angeles transportation official said Monday that the U.S. Postal Service does not have to pay 85 tickets issued to mail carriers who parked postal trucks overnight in a city-owned lot in North Hollywood without feeding the parking meters.

The tickets were issued during the past three weeks after parking administrators warned postal officials to begin paying $1 per vehicle for parking overnight or to stop using the lot in the 11300 block of Chandler Boulevard.

But the warning was a mistake, said Bob Yates, the city’s parking administrator. Federally owned vehicles are exempt from city parking regulations, he said.

“It was a matter of the right hand not really knowing what the left was doing,” Yates said Monday.

Mail carriers have used the 48-space lot to park up to 27 government vehicles every night since the early 1970s because there is no other place to park overnight in the neighborhood, said Bill Guest, manager of the Chandler Station Post Office, which adjoins the lot. Prior to that, postal carriers used their own vehicles and took them home at night, he said. Before that, they used bicycles to deliver the mail, Guest said.

On Nov. 8, postal officials got a letter from the city telling them to stop using the lot for free by Nov. 13, said Dale J.E. Herbert, acting postmaster of the Van Nuys division, which includes North Hollywood.

“It’s the worst time of year with the holiday mail, and then we had parking tickets to worry about,” Herbert said.

Yates said he signed the letter because a parking enforcement supervisor happened to notice the postal vehicles in the lot one afternoon and was worried that residents and shoppers in the area were being deprived of parking spots. But Yates said more than 600 area residents have signed petitions supporting the post office’s use of the lot.

In addition, Councilman John Ferraro wrote to the city Department of Transportation, pointing out that the post office maintains the city-owned lot for free and has installed lights there. “It appears to me that two governmental agencies must work together for the good of the entire community,” Ferraro said in the Dec. 1 letter.

In retrospect, writing the warning letter to the post office and directing parking enforcement officers to issue tickets was “probably a bit ill-advised,” Yates said Monday.

Acting Postmaster Herbert called Yates’ admission “quite an achievement.” He said he will take particular satisfaction in ripping up the 85 tickets because he got a ticket last month for illegally parking his personal car when he visited the Chandler Station post office to check out the situation.