Despite Furor, Glendale Is Ready to Vote on Street Parking Controls

When the Glendale City Council members instructed their staff last March to draft an ordinance regulating overnight parking as part of a broad plan to control the city’s burgeoning growth, no one suspected that they had lit a fuse that would generate political fireworks for months to come.

A year later--with charges of discrimination, hidden revenue scams and “ignoring the will of the people” still ringing in their ears--council members are preparing to vote on the proposal soon.

Through it all, the harder officials tried to convince residents that the parking policy was necessary and fair, the more opposition they seemed to galvanize.

The city’s problems began in August when residents found out that the Parking Commission was considering the city proposal to require paid permits for street parking in south Glendale between 2 and 6 a.m.

During three public hearings, stern-faced commissioners looked down on a disgruntled audience that heckled and booed them. Audience members charged that commissioners were making a mockery of the democratic system by holding hearings with their minds already made up.

At the fourth hearing, police in riot gear pushed back an angry mob trying to force its way into an already packed auditorium. The commissioners’ comments were drowned out by the shouting outside and the pounding on the glass entrance door.

The sixth hearing was held at the Civic Auditorium and about 300 showed up. A hand count showed the obvious: Only a few supported the government initiative.

About 50 residents showed up at the final hearing. Outside City Hall, a dozen demonstrators carried picket signs with anti-government slogans. The biggest sign lent an Orwellian touch to the drama, asking “What’s Next, Big Brother?” In a last-ditch effort to stop the plan, many invoked the winds of freedom sweeping Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, the commission approved the city-sponsored proposal.

The City Council will consider the parking proposal in upcoming weeks after parking commissioners complete a report outlining the reasons behind their vote.

Glendale’s parking woes are but a symptom of a difficult problem facing the city in its struggle to tame the effects of its seemingly unavoidable urbanization.

On the surface, the issue of overnight parking seems an unlikely candidate to provoke widespread public discontent.

But as the city changes, so does its political culture. Thousands of immigrants from the Middle East, Asia and Latin America are flocking to what was once considered a relatively affluent, mostly white bedroom community that proudly preserved its small-town flavor.

On Brand Boulevard, Glendale’s broad, palm tree-lined main street, cars still park diagonally, the same way they have since the advent of the automobile. Brand is surrounded by a huge shopping mall, old one- and two-story buildings housing small businesses, and towering iron-and-glass skyscrapers that serve as headquarters for large corporations. There are few residences, so the streets are nearly deserted overnight.

To the north, on the hillsides and in the canyons, neighbors manicure the gardens of their spacious single-family homes, while their cars rest safely tucked away in their two- and three-car garages. The streets remain relatively uncluttered at all times.

But in the increasingly dense and ethnically mixed apartment neighborhoods south of the Ventura Freeway, where old Glendale is quickly giving way to the new, few people can afford the luxury of keeping their cars off the streets.

Most of the apartments there have insufficient parking, and several landlords rent some of their garage space for storage.

In addition, the families moving in generally are bigger and have more cars than the community of senior citizens that made up most of the city’s apartment population less than two decades ago.

In the last 10 years, Glendale’s population has jumped from 145,000 to about 190,000, with most of the new arrivals settling in south Glendale apartments and condominiums.

As a result, cars line both sides of the streets most nights and evenings. The problem, however, has not reached desperate proportions. Even in the most crowded areas, residents may be forced to park half a block away from their homes.

But from the perspective of the city’s powerful Chamber of Commerce, the situation is intolerable already. The city relies on its squeaky-clean image to attract upscale businesses to its downtown commercial district.

Chamber and city leaders have made it clear they believe that the sight of cluttered streets and the influx of residents make the city less attractive.

“It is believed this ordinance would . . . offer an indirect approach to limiting the number of persons living in residential units and limit the number of automobiles,” the chamber stated in its newsletter.

To be sure, at least a dozen other Southern California cities have similar ordinances and rarely does anybody make a fuss about them. But those cities had different reasons for their ordinances.

In the Melrose district in Los Angeles, for example, permit parking was instituted to keep shoppers in the commercial district from taking up residents’ parking spaces. And in Pasadena and South Pasadena, the ordinances were adopted decades ago to aid street sweeping, when parking congestion was not an issue.

Glendale Traffic Engineer Tom Horne can recite a list of cities with overnight parking restrictions, but he cannot point to a single one where the conditions are even close to what is taking place in Glendale.

“Our situation is unique,” Horne said. “We’ve taken bits and pieces from different cities and adapted them to Glendale’s needs.”

City leaders in Glendale feel strongly about the unpopular overnight parking ordinance because they believe that it will serve as a much-needed growth-control mechanism to curtail the city’s population explosion.

Last March, at the City Council’s request, Horne wrote the first draft of the overnight parking ordinance and introduced it to the volunteer Parking Commission.

In January, after the proposal had been widely criticized in public hearings, the chamber endorsed it.

Besides making it more difficult for large numbers of people to continue moving into Glendale, the proposed ordinance would “help the city of Glendale for aesthetic reasons, increase safety by allowing better access to emergency vehicles, provide better access in street sweeping,” according to an unsigned article on the chamber publication’s front page.

By then, the draft ordinance had been modified substantially from what was first proposed. Initially, Horne had suggested that the city charge $15 for the first parking permit, and up to $120 for a fourth permit if needed. Residents would receive 14 one-day guest permits per year per household, and the permit program would apply to south Glendale only.

As a result, south Glendale residents filled the hearing rooms and accused the city of discrimination for targeting their neighborhoods, and of unfair taxation disguised as permit charges.

The residents of south Glendale complained about the loss of privacy if they are required to inform the city when they have overnight guests and said they were being forced to pay because the city had failed to plan for the increase in automobiles.

If there is a parking problem, many of them contended, then the city should build public parking structures to solve it. City officials quickly dismissed this alternative as fiscally unsound.

Soon after the shoving incident in September, Horne decided to cancel hearings in November and December and come back with a revised proposal for the Jan. 27 meeting at the Civic Auditorium.

While the proposal needed some fine-tuning, Horne and Councilman Dick Jutras insisted that the main problem was that the people did not understand what the ordinance would do.

New Image, a local public relations firm that does much work for the city, was hired to prepare an illustrated brochure that was mailed out citywide, inviting residents to the meeting.

The revised ordinance introduced in January would be enforced citywide to avoid the appearance of discrimination. The first two permits would be free, and the number of $2 guest permits would be increased from 14 to 60 per household.

But instead of deflecting criticism, the changes broadened opposition. For the first time, residents from all over the city spoke up against the proposal.

South Glendale residents continued to argue that the proposal did not make sense and that it amounted to taxing the poor. North Glendale residents were furious because they would be inconvenienced by the permit process for a problem that did not exist in their neighborhoods.

Nothing else had changed. Once again, Horne and the parking commissioners were jeered, heckled and made fun of by a crowd that was growing increasingly cynical, bitter and disappointed.

“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,” south Glendale resident Bob Moynahan said as the crowd of 300 laughed and applauded.

By then, Citizens Against Parking Permits had been formed. On the mornings before the hearings, its members would drive around the city between 2 and 6 a.m. and place flyers and petitions on parked cars.

The flyers, decorated with 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 proposed ordinance.

Close to 1,000 people signed the group’s petitions against the proposal, addressed to the Parking Commission. In February, the group organized two small demonstrations in front of City Hall.

By the time that Horne and the Parking Commission held their final February hearing, both residents and city officials seemed to have given up trying to change each others’ minds. No flyers were mailed, no new proposals were unveiled and fewer than 50 people attended.

Resigned and subdued, the audience applauded unenthusiastically as speakers stretched their imaginations to come up with new arguments against the proposal.

“The bottom line is, do we live in a democracy or a dictatorship?” asked C. E. Cadden, one of the speakers.

On that day, Horne cited a new report that outlined for the first time the projected costs and revenue of the overnight parking ordinance. Since the beginning, Horne had contended that the city would not make money from the ordinance, “only recover costs.”

Several speakers had questioned this in previous hearings. Some had even called Horne a liar. Upon careful review, the document showed that despite start-up costs, the city stood to gain more than $200,000 the first year alone from permit fees and parking fines.

Less than a dozen people stayed until the end of the hearing to witness the commission vote 3 to 2 in favor of the proposal. Those who did stay were hardly surprised.

“They’ve bulldozed this thing through since the beginning,” sighed a tired-looking Dale Goeden, who was slumped on a chair near the back row. “We all knew this would happen.”