Parking Scofflaws Tax City Resources

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office does not have enough staff to pursue and prosecute thousands of parking scofflaws who owe the city more than $226 million, according to City Atty. James K. Hahn.

“Solving the scofflaw problem will require additional investigatory and prosecutorial staff and resources,” Hahn said in a letter three weeks ago in response to Mayor Tom Bradley’s request for aggressive prosecution of parking violators.

But Bradley said last week that the resource needs are “slight” compared to the potential ticket revenue, which he called a “jackpot for the city as we enter a fiscally tight year.”

“I envision a self-funding enforcement program,” he wrote to Hahn, City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie and S. E. Rowe, general manager of the Department of Transportation, which oversees parking enforcement and collections.

“I am bothered by the absence of an immediate plan of action,” Bradley said. “I ask the three of you to make this happen, and would appreciate your advice back within 30 days, to include both a program budget and timetables.”

Hahn had told Bradley that his office would need at least two more attorneys, one support staffer, computer equipment and help from Department of Transportation investigators.

However, the city attorney’s office faces 6% cuts totaling $2.1 million in attorney and support staff in the coming fiscal year, according to spokesman Mike Qualls.

To support his assertion that a prosecution effort could be self-funding, Bradley referred to a Department of Transportation estimate that “as much as $33.6 million in unpaid parking fines is attributable to the tactics of serious, individual violators.”

Maureen Siegel, assistant city attorney who is acting chief of criminal operations, said prosecuting the owners of 75,000 vehicles with five or more tickets would be “a massive undertaking . . . and we can’t do it with existing staff.”

The 173 attorneys in the criminal division are already overburdened, she said. “This bears on the priorities we have to assign, the child molests, the assaults and batteries, the domestic violence. You have to throw that all into the equation in determining the resources you’re going to make available to essentially performing a money-collection function as opposed to a crime prevention-fighting punishment function.”

The fines became an issue in April when The Times reported that the city had nearly $250 million in uncollected fines from tickets on the books. City officials subsequently revised the figure to $226 million.

Since then, the city attorney’s office has filed a criminal complaint against one repeated violator. He is Yoram Kadosh who, according to parking records, had stacked up 124 unpaid tickets with $5,108 in fines and penalties.

The case, however, points up the difficulty in finding and prosecuting alleged violators.

“This guy has a bunch of tickets under a bunch of names,” Dan Jeffries, assistant supervisor of the city attorney’s Hill Street branch said.

Meanwhile, City Councilman Nate Holden proposed last week that the city set up a reward system that would pay people to turn in parking scofflaws. Holden, chairman of the council’s Traffic and Transportation Committee, said his proposed ordinance would provide an inducement for violators to pay fines.