Parking Tickets Up 60% Over Prior Year : Traffic: Santa Clarita has brought in $6,550 since it took over administration. It no longer has to share revenue with the courts.

Nearly 60% more parking tickets have been written since the city began processing them instead of the courts, and explanations for the surge range from convenience to coincidence.

California law mandated cities to assume the administration of parking violations by Jan. 1. The new law switched the violations from a criminal to a civil matter, allowing cities to ease the workload of crowded municipal courts and earn more per citation.

Santa Clarita took over the process in October. Officials didn’t anticipate a change in revenues or the number of tickets issued, but ticket writing jumped more than half from the prior year.

Sheriff’s deputies wrote 940 parking citations in Santa Clarita from October through December, said city Finance Director Steve Stark; it was a 58.8% increase from the 592 tickets issued during those months in 1992.

“I think it’s a good trend,” said Santa Clarita Mayor George Pederson, a law enforcement officer for 31 years. “If we have a parking ordinance, we need to enforce it because otherwise people will ignore it.”

Officials are unsure what prompted the flurry of additional citations.

Some suggest that it’s due to a new appeal process that’s less inconvenient for deputies.

With parking tickets no longer settled through criminal proceedings, deputies don’t attend court whenever someone contests a citation. A deputy may be more willing to write a ticket without the prospect of spending an afternoon in court to verify it.

Residents have appealed only 27 parking citations in the past six months, with 14 of them dismissed. The most common appeals have been for not having a current registration sticker or parking in a handicapped zone.

Some say parking citations are more apt to be written when the revenue comes to the city. Santa Clarita used to pay 11 cents of every parking ticket dollar to the courts to cover processing costs, but now keeps the full amount.

City and law enforcement officials reject that explanation.

“You’ve got to realize that the city and Sheriff’s Department, and I think any other public agency, don’t see parking citations or moving violations as a source for revenue,” said Sgt. Steve Mulcahy, who handles traffic matters at the Santa Clarita station.

Adding credence to that view is that while more parking tickets were written once Santa Clarita took over the process, little more revenue has come in.

Santa Clarita received $6,550 between October and December for parking citations, a slight increase from the $6,011 grossed the year before. After the 11% removed for processing, the city earned $5,350 from parking citations in the fourth quarter of 1992.

“The purpose (for writing parking tickets) is to keep the streets clear. I want to see enforcement, but I want it to be a measured enforcement,” Pederson said. “I don’t want it to become a policy of the city that it’s a money generator.”

Santa Clarita parking fines range from $25 for being in a red zone to $325 for parking in a handicapped zone. They were not increased when the city took over the administrative process.

Others say parking citations often rise and fall from year to year, and the recent surge is simply coincidental with Santa Clarita taking over the administrative process.