City Turns Screws on Parking Scofflaws

In an expanded effort to clamp down on parking scofflaws, Mayor Tom Bradley and the city’s parking administrator Thursday announced a doubling of the number of city crews that place immobilizing “boots” on cars with five or more unpaid parking tickets.

Ten two-member booting teams are now cruising Los Angeles streets, as well as airport parking lots, between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m., including Saturdays.

“We’re determined to catch those people who willfully and deliberately fail to pay their parking citations,” Bradley said.

The new effort began July 1 with $250,000 in specially budgeted city funds, according to Robert Yates, city Department of Transportation parking administrator. It will target 75,000 vehicles that city records show have five or more outstanding tickets.

The campaign supplements an existing booting program that began in 1987 and has averaged 95 vehicles immobilized per day, Yates said. He predicted that revenues generated by the program also will double, to about $500,000 a month.

Booting crews have access to a car’s ticket history through computer terminals in their vehicles.

Once a vehicle is identified, the crew locks the steel alloy device around the rim of the left front tire, rendering the vehicle disabled. To get it removed, a motorist must pay the tickets within three days, along with a $35 booting fee, or the vehicle is towed to an impound yard.

Motorists must pay the fines at one of three Parking Violation Bureau offices--at 213 W. 6th St., Suite 1200; 8835 W. Pico Blvd., or 6309 Van Nuys Blvd., Room 103.

However, Yates said cars with more than $1,000 in outstanding tickets will be immediately impounded. If the motorist does not pay the fines and reclaim the vehicle from impound, the towing company may sell the car at auction.

In another move toward more aggressive enforcement, city traffic officers are now issuing tickets to vehicles with expired registrations. That effort follows a change in state law as of July 1 and has led to 6,000 citations in the first two weeks of the month. The city will collect $23 fines for those tickets, Yates said.

In April, parking officials disclosed that the city had nearly $249 million in unpaid parking tickets on its books, a figure subsequently revised downward to $226 million. Since then, Bradley has been pushing the officials to collect more revenues and the city attorney to prosecute flagrant violators, calling the potential revenue “a jackpot for the city in a fiscally tight year.”