L.A. Sitting on Gold Mine of Unpaid Parking Tickets

The city of Los Angeles has close to $249 million in unpaid parking tickets on the books--almost three times the city’s annual ticket revenue and enough money to fund the Fire Department for a year.

A total of 5.4 million tickets have not been paid, records show. And 74,000 vehicles have accumulated five or more tickets, making them susceptible to towing or impounding by the city.

The worst parking offenders, records show, have amassed between 50 and 178 tickets on their cars or trucks, each representing thousands of dollars in potential city revenue.

Scofflaws often park in the same area of town, even on the same street, picking up two or three tickets a day, a Times review found.

But parking officials acknowledge that many of the biggest violators manage to beat the system, despite improvements in the city’s parking enforcement efforts.

Many violators do not bother to register their vehicles with the state, which requires payment of local parking fines before renewal.

And about half of the violators whose vehicles are impounded by the city simply abandon them rather than pay the fines.

“There are still many, many millions (of dollars) we should be getting ahold of,” Parking Administrator Bob Yates acknowledged. “The problem is the system has been a bit archaic for many years.”

After a Times inquiry, officials in the city attorney’s office said Friday that they would meet this week with parking officials to set up a pilot project to prosecute serious violators.

“When you’re looking at this amount of money, it behooves the city to take these steps to collect that money and add it to city coffers,” said Mike Qualls, a spokesman in the city attorney’s office.

Mayor Tom Bradley sent City Atty. James K. Hahn a letter Friday urging him to prosecute repeat offenders, and he asked parking officials to report within 15 days on their efforts to collect unpaid tickets. “The $250 million could be a jackpot for the city as we enter a fiscally tight year,” the mayor said.

The Times found that Los Angeles’ problem with unpaid parking tickets is the worst in California--far more than San Diego’s $24 million in unpaid tickets, or San Francisco’s $39 million.

But some other major cities have even more outstanding tickets. New York, for example, reports $1.9 billion in unpaid parking fines. Chicago counts about $400 million in unpaid fines.

Still, the potential parking revenue is of great importance to Los Angeles. Bradley recently froze most city hiring until June 30 because of a $3-million funding shortage.

The shortage, he said, was caused in part by a work slowdown among parking-ticket writers that is expected to reduce parking revenue by $20 million this year.

The top 20 violators alone owe the city about $100,000.

Several of their vehicles were registered to delivery companies and one to a rental-car company. The city’s biggest violator, a Los Angeles-area delivery company, owes $18,000 in fines on two trucks.

This case and others reviewed by The Times point up basic problems in the city’s collection system:

* Enforcement usually focuses on impounding the vehicle rather than prosecuting the person responsible for large numbers of tickets.

* The collection process is so slow that fines often exceed the vehicle’s value by the time it is impounded. So the owner is not motivated to retrieve it.

* Some violators accept tickets as the price of doing business in congested areas, such as downtown.

* Loopholes in state law allow violators who intentionally defy the system to repeat the process with other vehicles.

Records show that the leading parking violator, G/M Trucking of Redondo Beach, has 134 tickets amounting to $10,821 in fines on a 1985 truck, which now sits in a city impound lot. The company also owes another $7,217 for 100 unpaid tickets on another vehicle that still is on the road.

“I don’t have the money to come up with $10,000 for something only worth $3,000 or $4,000,” said the company’s owner, Michael Laney.

He said that his drivers were forced to park illegally because there is not enough available free parking and parking lots are too expensive.

“Time is crucial,” Laney said. “You’ve got to take your chances.”

Now, after four trucks have been impounded, Laney said that his seven remaining vehicles are serving only the Eastside area.

“I gave up downtown,” he said. “It was getting to the point all my trucks will be gone.”

The city, meanwhile, is issuing more tickets than in the past.

Since the city Department of Transportation took over parking enforcement from the Police Department five years ago, the number of traffic officers has climbed from 360 to 562. The number of citations has quadrupled to 4.3 million and ticket revenues increased fivefold to $90 million last year, according to parking chief Yates.

But $248,792,000 in unpaid fines and penalties has accumulated during those five years.

If collected, the money could more than finance the Fire Department’s $228-million annual budget in 1989-90. The money is also roughly equivalent to the city’s combined street maintenance budget for the last three years.

City Chief Administrative Officer Keith Comrie said he does not know how the money would be spent if collected. But he speculated that it might be used to purchase new police cars and repair streets.

Only $4 million in delinquent parking-ticket fees was collected in the last year, according to Edgar Hayes, senior vice president of Lockheed Information Management Services Co. The city contracts with the firm to collect delinquent tickets for a 30% commission.

Hayes said that about $87 million is deemed uncollectable for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of information from the Department of Motor Vehicles on owner identities. But he said his company is pursuing the remaining $162 million.

Yates said he is not overly concerned about the uncollected $249 million, noting that it represents only about 30% of the total tickets written in the last five years.

The parking enforcement effort, he said, should be judged on how well it keeps the streets functioning. “The success of the program is not based on dollars and cents,” he said. “The success of parking management is, are we keeping peak-hour traffic lanes cleared? Is meter parking available to be shared by everybody? Are the red zones and handicapped zones being enforced?”

But in a letter Friday to Department of Transportation General Manager S. E. Rowe, Mayor Bradley stressed the importance of maximizing collection of unpaid tickets. “There is no reason we should not pursue these parking offenders in the most aggressive manner,” he said.

To collect delinquent revenues, the city uses mailed notices and, in extreme cases, impounds cars.

But if addresses provided by the DMV are not accurate, the city and its collection agency make no additional effort to locate violators.

In New York City, however, a special unit is assigned to tracking down violators. It collected more than $16 million last year.

In cases where five or more tickets are outstanding, Los Angeles applies the wheel-locking device called the Denver Boot, or impounds the car until the tickets are paid. If the tickets remain unpaid, the cars are sold.

The city impounded 95,531 vehicles last year. But officials concede that the process is often slow, because regular traffic officers have no idea whether a car is subject to impound when they are writing a new ticket.

Yates said a pilot program later this year will provide traffic officers with “electronic ticket writers” linked to a master computer containing each vehicle’s ticket history.

Parking officials say it is often difficult to find parking violators, let alone to collect money from them.

“The scofflaw has often moved, and quite frequently the vehicle has changed hands and not been re-registered,” Yates said. “The majority of scofflaws that have a big dollar amount are driving unregistered vehicles. . . .”

In trying to contact the top 20 violators, The Times was unable to locate 15 of the owners at the addresses listed on their state vehicle registration. Two of the addresses did not even exist.

One of the vehicles was registered to Jean Pierre Pujol of Lake View Terrace.

Pujol said his 1987 Suzuki had been stolen about two months after he bought it. “I don’t know what happened to it,” Pujol said. Beginning in January, 1988, city records show, whoever drove the car piled up 97 parking tickets and $5,783 in fines.

One of the registered owners who could not be reached was Yoram Kadosh, whose listed address did not exist. A 1983 Oldsmobile registered to him accumulated 124 tickets worth $5,108 in the last year, most of them in the downtown garment district.

The registration on the Oldsmobile has expired, so officials do not even know who the current owner is.

“This is somebody who will park anyplace, with virtually no regard for any of the restrictions,” Yates said.

Under the current system, the state controls the primary tool for ensuring payment of delinquent parking tickets. Violations accumulated by drivers are sent to the DMV, which requires payment of the fines before a vehicle’s registration can be renewed.

But city parking officials say they want the system extended so scofflaws will not be allowed to renew the registration on any vehicle--or their driver’s licenses.

Under a two-year pilot program started in January, parking tickets are being applied against a replacement vehicle, DMV spokeswoman Gina McGuiness said, if a registered owner sells a car with 25 or more citations. But the DMV in the past has not favored punitive actions against an owner’s driver’s license, she said, because “the parking violator might not be the registered owner of the car.”

Some other states, such as Illinois, have passed laws tying driver’s licenses to parking citations, and more than 10 such tickets can lead to license suspension.

Times researcher Cecilia Rasmussen contributed to this story.

TOP 10 LIST OF UNPAID PARKING TICKETS

Registered Owner Tickets Fines 1.)G & M Trucking 134 $10,821 100 7,217 2.)Kevin D. Dunn 101 7,913 3.)Graf Air Freight 101 7,136 4.)Tony Siganoff 115 6,242 5.)Jean Pierre Pujol* 97 5,783 6.)Martinez Used Cars 180 5,615 7.)Mancill Stewart, Jr. 94 5,503 8.)Thomas Ybarra 135 5,260 9.)Southwest Leasing & Rental 114 5,203 10.)Yoram Kadosh 124 5,108

Registered Owner Car/License 1.)G & M Trucking 1985 Ford/3C03704 1987 Ford/2X86724 2.)Kevin D. Dunn 1978 Int’l Tractor/2W11655 3.)Graf Air Freight 1984 Chevrolet/2G66660 4.)Tony Siganoff 1980 Cadillac/262ZLP 5.)Jean Pierre Pujol* 1987 Suzuki/2EVZ820 6.)Martinez Used Cars 1981 Renault/1BDT349 7.)Mancill Stewart, Jr. 1985 Toyota/1NKK720 8.)Thomas Ybarra 1977 Ford/2AFH013 9.)Southwest Leasing & Rental 1986 Honda/1NTX669 10.)Yoram Kadosh 1983 Oldsmobile/1FHS970

*Pujol says vehicle in question was stolen in 1987. Notes: According to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, these are the registered owners of the vehicles. City parking ticket figures are as of April 13. Source: City of Los Angeles parking agency The Value of Outstanding Parking Tickets in Selected Cities New York: $1.879 billion Chicago: $400 million Los Angeles: $249 million San Francisco: $39 million San Diego: $23.7 million