Parking Scofflaws Note: Fines Heading Up : Government: But officials presented the plan as merely an administrative effort to achieve consistency with neighboring cities, not a revenue-raiser.

When a city that bills itself as a trendsetter starts to extol the virtue of going along with the crowd, read the fine print: It’s going to cost you money.

That trend-setting city is Santa Monica, which has recently made the first move toward a dramatic increase in parking fines, although one could have easily missed that point from listening to the staff presentation at a recent council meeting.

The subject was presented to the council as a measure aimed at attaining administrative consistency with the neighboring cities of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood (Culver City may join in too). These, of course, are the same cities Santa Monica usually talks about being ahead of.

The oral and written staff reports were models of bureaucratic fog. They cited changes in state law that decriminalize parking fines, essentially requiring cities to set up a new civil fine system.

To City Manager John Jalili and Finance Director Mike Dennis, the state changes spelled an opportunity to raise parking fines for the first time since 1981.

“This presents the city with an excellent opportunity to cooperate with some of the Westside cities to implement unified administrative procedures and standardize fines,” said the staff report from Dennis.

Translation: The city is seeking to make a major dent in its anticipated $5.8 million revenue shortfall for next year by more than doubling the base fine for parking at an expired meter or in the wrong spot on street-cleaning day.

The council, usually noted for its tendency to talk at length about even minor matters, dispatched the parking fine item in six minutes flat at about 11:15 p.m. last week. The vote was 6 to 0 with Councilman Robert T. Holbrook absent.

In what passed for the most direct comment on the matter, City Councilman Paul Rosenstein said, “I take it it’s not likely we’ll be lowering fines.”

The rest of the council asked nary a question.

“Our primary purpose was to, in essence, increase public service and reduce (administrative) costs,” Finance Director Dennis said in an interview. “It’s confusing to go to four different cities, with four different processes.”

Former City Councilman Christine Reed has another take on it:

“I think they just want more money, and they’ve kind of cloaked it all in this talk about public convenience,” Reed said. After reading the staff report, Reed said it seemed designed to get the minimum amount of public notice possible.

No date has been set for a hearing or vote on the ordinance. If the measure is passed, the base price of an expired meter ticket would jump from $10 to $23, plus in each case $5 for the state-required courthouse construction fund. So a ticket that costs $15 now would cost $28 under the new rate structure.

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Fines for more expensive parking infractions, such as parking in front of a hydrant, would rise from $20 to $28, plus the $5 state fee for a total of $33.

The late-payment penalty would also jump under the proposal from $20 to at least $30. An expired meter ticket that was not paid on time could cost $58, instead of $25 as it now does.

Dennis said about 400,000 tickets were issued last year, bringing in $4 million in revenue. The proposed increase in fines would yield $2.2 million more, a huge chunk of the city’s anticipated budget shortfall.

The finance director said he does not know how much the city would save in administrative costs, if it can share them with other cities.

Under a new state law that will go into effect July 1, parking fines will be removed from the criminal court system and handled as civil matters by administrative hearing officers. This requires cities to amend their municipal codes and set up a system to process tickets, including a way for the public to fight them.

Dennis said the new system will allow someone with parking tickets from more than one of the Westside cities to handle them all with one-stop shopping. (He acknowledged that parking scofflaws will still be able to read the amount due on the ticket and pay fines by mail.)

The fine for street-cleaning day tickets was raised sharply--from $15 to $38--as an environmental measure, Dennis said. Debris left when the street sweeper has to go around parked cars gets into the storm drains, polluting the ocean, he said.

Holbrook said he opposes the suggested fine hikes as excessive, especially during a recession when many retail operations are hanging by a thread. “What’s the story about killing the Golden Goose?” he asked. “The trend today should be to make it as easy to shop here as possible. . . . People who get a ticket in Santa Monica don’t care how much it costs somewhere else.”

The City Council members and other top officials will be somewhat protected from this increase in the cost of parking illegally. They are issued a placard that allows them to park at meters all over the city for free, although the official city policy--not always observed--is that the placards be used only when they are on city business.

Jalili insists he is personally vigilant about separating work from play. “When I go out for lunch, I feed the meters,” he said.