Ticket-Writing Habits Curbed in Hermosa Beach

Hermosa Beach has an image problem. Ask any driver. Ask Melvin Lee. “The Parking Ticket Capital of the World,” sighed Lee, a city field supervisor in parking enforcement.

In the cramped realm of beach parking, Hermosa Beach reigns: No other coastal city in Los Angeles County generates as many tickets per capita, nor as much local meter maid lore.

But the City Council is out to change that image with a new directive. In an effort to encourage kinder, gentler parking enforcement, the council approved a policy explicitly permitting officers to void parking tickets “in the interest of public relations.”

“I have been bombarded long enough with the enormous pressure brought on by the enforcement Gestapo of this city,” Councilman Chuck Sheldon said. “There’s no reason not to demonstrate that this council is serious about relaxing parking enforcement.”

The remark is a far cry from city policy in the late 1970s and ‘80s, when Hermosa Beach was desperate for revenue and local merchants were up in arms about beach-goers who hogged the handful of parking spaces that otherwise would be available to customers. Strict enforcement was encouraged. In 1982, parking ticket revenues accounted for 20% of the city’s general fund--a figure that dropped only slightly, to 17%, last year.

In Hermosa Beach, a city of only about 19,000 residents, 83,163 tickets were written last year--more than four for every man, woman and child in the city. By comparison, Manhattan Beach, which has 31,000 residents, issued 81,937 tickets (2.6 per capita) and Redondo Beach, which has 64,000 residents, issued only 18,660 tickets.

Long Beach issued about one ticket for each of its 420,000 residents, and Los Angeles issued 1.3 tickets per capita. Only the meter checkers in Santa Monica came close to Hermosa Beach on a per capita basis among beach cities last year--with an average 3.9 tickets per citizen.

Hermosa Beach’s enforcers were far less productive than in Beverly Hills, where the citation-per-citizen average ran close to seven tickets last year.

The enforcement--and the fact that the cheapest parking ticket is $18 in Hermosa Beach--has generated no small amount of tension. Although most parking officers already void five to seven tickets a day, Lee said the public’s perception is that officers show no mercy in Hermosa Beach.

“People curse at us, people scream at us, people aim their garden hoses at us. One guy threw an egg at one of our officers a few years ago,” Lee said.

In January, a parking officer told police a driver swore at him, spit on him, revved her car engine, then tried to run him down in his Cushman cart after he issued her a citation on an expired meter.

Lately, even the merchants in Hermosa Beach have been complaining about the enthusiasm of the city’s nine parking officers.

The owner of Fat Face Fenner’s Falloon, a local bar, has installed a “meter maid alarm” that sets off a shrieking siren and flashing orange light any time one of the city’s familiar Cushman carts hums into view. Lilyan Kerekgyarto, a waitress at a seaside cafe, said she sneaks as much as $5 a day in quarters into expired meters so her customers will keep coming back.

Drugstore owner Garrison Frost said that he has banned parking enforcement officers from his 80-year-old establishment, Coast Drug.

“They’re Gestapos,” he said, adding that on several occasions he has refused to sell ink pens to parking officers. “I’m not going to do business with people who drive my business away.”

The dissatisfaction, which has simmered for some time in the city, surfaced during the most recent election when Councilman Robert Essertier made relaxed parking enforcement part of his campaign. The concerns came up again in a goal-setting session of the new council, in a meeting with the local Chamber of Commerce, and after the recent retirement of the head of the city department that oversees parking, council members said.

In a memo to the council, Henry LeRoy Staten, acting general services director, suggested that the council could soothe the public by investing $8,770 in a public relations campaign. His suggestions ran from a 20-page guide to the “Do’s and Don’ts of Parking in Hermosa Beach,” to retraining the officers and giving them blue uniforms instead of the brown ones that Lee said make them “look like UPS men with a badge, or gas station attendants with an attitude.”

The council tabled most of those ideas last week until the General Services Department--which handles parking--has a new, full-time director. However, they did pass a policy reminding officers that if they do not already dismiss tickets, they can do so when the violation does not threaten public safety.

“If the vehicle is broken down, or the guy went to bring back change (for the meter), or the guy says he’ll move his car, we already give them that leniency,” Lee said. The new directive will simply encourage officers to go easy on motorists more often, he said.