REGIONAL REPORT : Summer Nightmare Nears End in Beach Communities : Parking: Fierce competition every year for too few spaces leaves residents and vacationers hot and bothered.

Louise Lyons has been around the block a few times.

At 62, she is the matriarch of meter maids in Manhattan Beach. It is her job to prepare recruits for the kind of interaction they will have with citizens when the seaside community swells with summer tourists.

On her Cushman scooter, she leads them to a remote part of town in the quiet hills above Santa Monica Bay. There, she plays the part of a Manhattan Beach resident upset about a parking ticket. For her performance, Lyons draws on a decade of experience.

“I’m a resident!” she screams at the rookie meter maids. “I’m a taxpayer! I pay your salary! Don’t you have anything better to do? Why don’t you get a new job?” She spares them the obscenities.

“I push them just about as far as I can push,” she says of the exercise. “Sometimes it shakes them up pretty good. But you have to be able to take it because, in this job, you are going to be verbally pounced on and ripped up.”

Lyons and her beleaguered troops bear the brunt of a problem that emerges every summer as the single hottest issue in oceanfront enclaves throughout Southern California--too many cars, not enough spaces.

Politicians have campaigned on the parking issue. Police say it is their biggest headache. Towing companies have made money off it. Communities up and down the coast have come to depend on the hundreds of thousands of dollars they reap in parking fines to subsidize their municipal governments.

For want of a good parking spot--or even a bad one--neighbors battle neighbors. Exasperated tourists, their cars crammed with cranky kids, succumb to temptation and park in red zones, in handicapped spaces and even in strangers’ garages. For them, a parking ticket is a fair price for family sanity.

“I think people just lose their brains,” says Manhattan Beach resident Ken Sigler, adding that his own experience on the front lines has taught him this: Nothing erases chalk marks on tires better than rubber thongs. “They leave absolutely no trace,” he promises.

Hardest hit by the parking wars are communities where homes are densely clustered at the edge of the sand--as they are in the South Bay, Newport Beach and San Diego’s Mission Beach. In these areas, locals are forced to vie with inlanders and each other for a piece of the curb.

It is a rite of summer that no one likes.

Since the season’s traditional opening on Memorial Day, beach locals have been counting the weeks, the days and now finally the hours until its official close this Labor Day weekend, after which the tourists vanish, life mellows and residents do not have to arrange their schedules around the traffic flow.

Jason Bradley, for one, can’t wait. He rents a place on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, a six-mile-long mecca for vacationers and throngs of Orange County teen-agers.

“It just sucks,” he says of the peninsula’s recurring parking nightmare. In fact, the 20-year-old Bradley says he had been fuming over the problem all morning--ever since paying $300 in delinquent parking tickets to reclaim his Honda from a tow yard.

Balboa Market owner Sam Hammad sells a popular T-shirt that seems tailor-made for Bradley, one that illustrates how emotionally charged the parking issue has become in the wealthy community, where police wrote nearly 34,000 tickets last summer.

On the shirt’s front are a pair of muscular hands wrapped tightly around the neck of a bedraggled meter maid ticketing a car. “Welcome to Newport Beach,” it says. On the back is the likeness of a Newport parking citation with a red slash through it and the words, “$29 for a Parking Ticket Is a Crime.”

By that standard, Hammad himself could be called a discounter. He charges only $20 to park on his store’s lot when evening cruisers and sightseers bring traffic on the narrow peninsula to a virtual halt.

Trudy Truelock and her family, who spend a month every summer vacationing in Newport, have learned over the years to run for cover when the street sweeper comes rumbling through. Inevitably, she says, it is followed by a parade of cars that, once the sweeper passes, race for the empty curb.

“It’s a zoo,” Truelock says of the weekly spectacle. “They (drivers) almost run overkids. They’ll yell, ‘Hey, that’s my spot!’ People are absolutely rude to each other. It’s horrible.”

In Newport, as in other beach cities, parking is a political hot potato. On one side are businesses that want more parking to accommodate more customers. On the other are residents with big homes and garages who fear that additional parking will mean more congestion.

“As a police department, we’re stuck in the middle,” complains Lt. Tim Newman. “We’re literally pulled because you have competing interests. What’s good for business seems to be bad for residents. . . . Who do we listen to?”

Although the city has struggled for remedies, it seems that in the end, most everyone reaches the conclusion of “Uncle” Charlie Bauman, president of the Balboa Improvement Assn. “I don’t think there’s a solution,” he says.

Down the coast in San Diego’s crowded Mission Beach, the story is similar. Consider this statistic: on the Fourth of July, the city towed a staggering 200-plus cars off Mission Beach streets. That’s how tough it was to find a legal parking spot.

Dennis Bell, a Mission Beach resident for 15 years, says the parking crunch creates “high tension” in the neighborhood, causing the most laid-back locals to lose control--especially when brazen beachgoers block or park in their garages.

“I’ve seen people let air out of tires. I’ve seen them scratch, kick and throw stuff at cars,” he says with a smile.

Bell says he still remembers the peeved look on his wife’s face the day he kept her waiting at San Diego’s Lindberg Field. “She was not happy,” he recalls, “and neither was I.”

“I hadn’t seen her for two months,” Bell explains. “My only assignment that morning was to be at the airport to pick her up. I went outside and someone had blocked my garage.After I kicked the car a couple times, I got some friends together and we bounced it clear out into the alley.”

John Wiggins, who lived in Mission Beach for six years, says he misses the coast but not the cost. A bartender, he says he racked up $4,000 in parking tickets in his last two years there.

“I’d get home at 2 or 3 in the morning and I wasn’t about to walk a mile home from the nearest parking spot, so I parked in the red,” he says.

As bad as it is, residents fear parking is going to become even scarcer now that Mission Beach’s Belmont Park has been commercially developed and its historic Big Dipper roller coaster is running again for the first time in more than a decade.

Despite overwhelming community opposition, the City Council approved the park’s redevelopment and the coaster’s refurbishing because, as Councilman Bruce Henderson put it, “the right to ride the coaster is the birthright of every San Diego child.”

Up north in the South Bay, the Hermosa Beach City Council faced a near insurrection over its parking enforcement policies.

To cool things off, the council adopted a resolution that, if put before motorists of every traffic-clogged city in Southern California, would probably pass with nary a dissenting vote. The council empowered parking enforcement officers to cancel tickets on the spot--even after they’ve been tucked under the wiper.

“If someone has a good excuse, the parking person can void the ticket, smile and say, ‘Have a good day,’ ” explains Councilman Robert Essertier, who was elected on a promise to make parking officers more friendly.

“If we lose a little revenue and people feel more positive about their city, then I think it is well worth it,” says the 41-year-old councilman, adding that roughly 10% of the city’s parking citations are voided at curbside. Last year, Hermosa police wrote about 83,300 parking tickets, more than one-third of them during the three months of summer.

Essertier understands well the economics of the parking issue. He recently remodeled his Hermosa Beach home and adjacent rental property to boost their value. He added a bedroom, a bathroom and, most important, expanded the garage to hold 11 cars.

“Parking,” he says, “has a tremendous value to people in this real estate market.”

In Hermosa, residents can purchase an annual permit for $25 that lets them park free at designated meters, if any free meters can be found. The permits are so treasured that, perhaps inevitably, they are stolen and counterfeited. Parking officials say one forger was hawking excellent replicas for $20 apiece at neighborhood bars.

While the politics and logistics of parking vary from beach to beach, meter maids will tell you that when it comes to a ticket, human nature is the same everywhere. People get mad.

“There have been times when I just wanted to haul off and hit someone square in the mouth,” says meter maid boss Lyons of Manhattan Beach.

For example, she said, she recently cited a driver for parking in the wrong direction. He complained to police, and Lyons was dispatched to his house.

“We had a discussion but I refused to void the citation,” she says. “When he finally accepted that fact, he just took the cup of coffee he was holding and threw it on me. It went all down the front of my slacks and down my shirt.

“For a couple of seconds, I was just totally blank.”

She filed a complaint with police, forcing the man to hire an attorney and appear before a hearing officer. At that point, Lyons says, she dropped the matter.

“I could have requested a trial but I figured I had gone as far as I wanted to go,” she says. “I made my point. I very definitely made my point.”