A Trailer Load of Parking Tickets : Unpaid Fines of $111,856 Put Mobile Sign Firm Among Scofflaw Elite

If there was a record book of L. A.’s greatest scofflaws, the Calico Sign Co. would hold the all-time title for chutzpah, with an asterisk for dollar volume.

Calico’s $111,856 in delinquent parking fines--due on 2,947 citations--may still pale beside the $200,000-plus once racked up by a now-bankrupt car rental franchise.

But at the rate it is accumulating fines, Calico will soon be the undisputed No. 1, officials said.

According to the city Department of Transportation, the Canoga Park firm manufactures and rents a special type of trailer that automatically violates the law when used for its intended purpose.

The trailers carry advertising signs with such messages as, “Luxury condos! Turn right!” The Los Angeles Municipal Code prohibits advertising without permission on public property. And the city has categorically denied permission.

Yet the owners of condominiums and apartments continue to rent the signs and have them placed strategically in the parking lanes of well-traveled thoroughfares such as Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. Each weekend, dozens are scattered around high-density residential neighborhoods.

It is a problem the city has been working on for more then two years, so far with little success. In the process, it has written thousands of parking tickets on the mobile signs. Most of them go to Calico and Calico doesn’t pay them, said Jay Carsman, parking systems coordinator for the Department of Transportation.

“What we have with Calico is people who flagrantly violate the law,” Carsman said. “They know they’re illegal. They know they’re going to be cited. They don’t care.”

Officials at Calico did not return repeated calls from The Times.

Any firm that operates a fleet of vehicles is prone to parking tickets. The accumulated fines of taxi and delivery companies, for example, far outnumber the worst record an individual has ever tallied--about $11,000, Carsman said. But generally, with urging from the city, they put their problems in order long before the damage gets as bad as Calico’s, Carsman said.

“United Parcel, DHL, they are not even in this ballpark,” Carsman said. “Those companies are very responsible. We did have to work with all of them to kind of bring them on board. But when they get a ticket, they pay the ticket. L. A. Cab Co., they pay their parking tickets.”

Car rental companies, potentially the worst parking offenders, are not held responsible for their tickets if they turn over the names and addresses of the customers so the city can bill them.

Trailer signs are different. Because they cannot operate within the law, their owners have no incentive to cooperate. So far, government has failed to devise a punishment that fits their crime.

Back when the Department of Transportation’s parking enforcement officers began targeting advertising trailers, the fine for a parking ticket was only $13. The citations piled up without effect. Some of the trailer owners simply paid the fines, absorbing the cost as a business expense, Carsman said.

The Municipal Court then raised the fine to $53. Even that didn’t faze Calico, which simply ignored the tickets, apparently knowing the city could do nothing about it.

Initially, the city could not even track the tickets through the Department of Motor Vehicles’ database. The city’s computer program that culled the information didn’t know how to ask for the owners of trailers, which are licensed differently from cars.

The city had its consultant, Lockheed Datacom, amend the program so that it can now get the names of trailer owners, Carsman said. Finally, last September, armed with a computer printout long enough to hang from ceiling to floor, the department’s general manager, Ed Rowe, sent a letter to Calico’s president, Ray Chin, demanding payment of $83,554 for the 2,682 citations then outstanding. The firm failed to respond.

Rowe then turned the case over to the city attorney’s office for prosecution. The city attorney declined to prosecute.

“Unfortunately, without the staff or computer, or litigation support . . . we do not have the resources to take on this sort of responsibility,” said Maureen Siegel, head of the city attorney office’s criminal branch.

Prosecuting the infractions is extremely difficult, Siegel said. In theory, the city’s best option would be to issue a warrant and then, assuming the owner did not show up to pay it, prosecute for failure to appear.

“There is some likelihood of conviction, but it requires a great commitment of resources and our ability to put together an evidentiary trail,” Siegel said.

The law provides no way to lump multiple infractions together, so the process would have to be repeated for each ticket.

“We are a city in crisis,” Siegel said. “We have to give priority to violent crimes, the more serious offenses--manslaughter, child abuse, sexual exploitation of minors.”

Maybe so, but Carsman isn’t giving up.

His latest plan rests on a new law sponsored at the city’s request by state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana). It took effect Jan. 1 and allows the city to impound any trailer that has been cited twice.

This new bit of leverage has not yet been put to use. First, the city has to make a minor modification of its computer system to generate the lists of trailers the department’s field staff will target for impounding.

Once that’s done, Carsman will still have a worry. What if the company starts to pay the fines to recover the trailers?

“Maybe we need legislation that simply outlaws these trailers from the public streets,” Carsman said. “Then, when we pick them up, we won’t have to give them back.”