New Citywide Overnight Parking Plan Draws Uproar : Regulation: In spite of an angry response, a city commission will meet Feb. 5 on whether to forward to City Council a draft ordinance for paid parking permits in every neighborhood.

Residents of South Glendale roared when officials proposed requiring paid permits for overnight street parking in their neighborhoods. Officials got the message and proposed citywide permits--and now people from all over are angry.

After the original plan was made public, hundreds of south-end residents attended Parking Commission hearings and angrily criticized the proposed ordinance as a discriminatory and unfair tax.

On Monday night, at a special Parking Commission hearing in Glendale Civic Auditorium, city officials unveiled details of the new version, saying it would be fair and reasonable.

The new draft would offer free permits for each family’s first two cars and reduced rates for the rest. Each dwelling unit would get a year’s supply of 60 pre-approved one-time permits for guests. And the overnight-parking program would be imposed citywide.

The meeting was attended by hundreds of residents, who were notified by city flyers last month that there would be a citywide plan.

They jeered, booed and heckled staff and commission members, repeated old arguments and brought up some new ones--for example, that being forced to sign guest permits was an invasion of privacy. Many insisted that the ordinance does not make sense.

“You say you are doing this to get cars off the streets, but all you’re going to get is cars on the streets with stickers on them,” said Bob Moynahan, one of the speakers. The audience of 300 laughed and applauded, as it did throughout much of the hearing.

Larry Zarian was the only City Council member to show up. He soon left, politely refusing to field questions.

The commission plans to reconvene at 3:30 p.m., Feb. 5, at the City Council chambers to vote on whether to recommend the ordinance it helped draft.

On Monday commission members sat somber-faced with other city officials looking down from a table on the auditorium’s elevated stage. Three uniformed police officers sat at the back of the room while nine others guarded the doors.

These security measures--presumably aimed at preventing the shoving incidents and shouting matches that marked previous meetings--appeared to reinforce the residents’ repeated claims that the officials are isolated and not accessible.

“You are not listening to us!” a resident shouted into the microphone. Then, turning his back to the commissioners, he asked the crowd: “How many are against the ordinance?” More than 80% of the audience raised their hands. “How many are in favor?” he asked. About a dozen hands went up.

“Democracy has spoken!” he said, as he returned to his seat showered with applause.

The hearing included criticism from many parts of the city.

“I live in La Crescenta, and I don’t have a parking problem,” one speaker said. “I don’t want another tax to be able to park where I’ve parked for free all my life!”

The biggest round of applause went to Carma Liperr, founder of Citizens Against Parking Permits. CAPP, she said, has sent the city close to 1,000 petitions opposing the proposal. Throughout the hearing, she stood at the back of the auditorium, clipboard in hand, with a pile of petitions waiting to be signed.

The previous two nights, she said, she and fellow CAPP members had driven around the city between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., the hours of the proposed restriction, placing fliers and petitions on parked cars.

The fliers, decorated with the enlargements of $20 and $50 bills, ask, “How much are you willing to pay the city to park at night?” and list arguments against the ordinance.

As Liperr stepped up to the microphone after hearing her name called, all signs of weariness disappeared from her face.

“This is baaad Carma,” she began, and then proceeded to lash out at the officials. “Shame on you for writing this proposal!” she roared. “You say this is a citywide proposal, and you print the mailers announcing the meetings in English only? What about the Armenians and Mexicans who live in this city and don’t speak English? How are they going to find out what’s going on? Shame on you!”

Claims by Liperr and others at the meeting that ethnic minority groups would be the most affected by the proposal appeared to be bolstered by a city-commissioned telephone survey made public last week.

The study showed that, compared to “whites,” a significantly lower percentage of Latino, Asian and Middle Eastern households have as many off-street parking spaces as cars.

City Manager David Ramsay and Traffic Engineer Tom Horne said Parking Commission members would use parts of the survey--but not the ethnic breakdown--to fine-tune the ordinance.

In spite of the widespread opposition, the proposed ordinance has retained its support from the Glendale Chamber of Commerce.

In the January issue of its in-house publication, the chamber board of directors said the proposal would help the city “for aesthetic reasons, increase safety, by allowing better access to emergency vehicles, provide greater access for street sweeping, offer an indirect approach to limiting the number of persons living in residential units, and limit the number of automobiles.”

On Monday, Ken Doty, a Chamber of Commerce vice president and chamber ad hoc overnight parking committee member, was one of a few speakers to defend the proposal, although he said he was not representing the chamber.

“Take your time to drive around cities with overnight-parking ordinances, and talk to the people that live there,” he said. “Panic comments have been proven wrong in those cities.”

As he returned to the back of the room amid the snarls of the crowd, an acquaintance came up to Doty, patted him in the back and spoke quietly into his ear: “Congratulations, Ken, it takes a lot of guts to do what you just did.”