More Parking Tickets Are Part of Riordan Plan : Budget: His proposal to replace Westside city traffic officers with a private company gets a mixed reaction. The mayor says changes can bring in $9 million more a year.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan promised his city budget would deliver more. More police. More street repairs. More graffiti removal.

And more parking tickets.

One small chapter in the $4.3-billion spending plan that Riordan introduced this week would beef up parking enforcement crews--with a private company taking over the job on the Westside and more municipal parking officers fanning out across the rest of the city.

The entrepreneurial mayor believes that a net increase of 100 parking officers citywide will easily bring in $9 million more a year. That’s without even calculating how much more rapidly the private crews on the Westside--armed with electronic ticket writers and deployed by computer mapping--may be able to paper windshields with pink citations.

Riordan wants to use the deployment of the private ticket writers, which still needs City Council approval, as the first test of his theory that some government services can be delivered more efficiently by the private sector.

“We expect the public sector to become more efficient through the competition,” Riordan said in his budget address.

Westsiders should not feel singled out, the mayor’s advisers insist. They said the region was chosen by city transportation officials for the pilot parking enforcement program because it offers the widest range of parking restrictions in the most compact geographic area. And the 100 city parking officers now working on the Westside will be redeployed around the rest of Los Angeles, meaning more tickets for everyone, said transportation department officials.

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Still, the expected arrival of private parking officers sometime this year is a sobering notion for some--from the Westsiders who say that the area could become less hospitable for shoppers to the municipal parking enforcement officers who worry that their meal ticket is on the line.

Officials of the Automobile Club of Southern California said they will be watching the city’s program closely.

“Citizens may be sort of ticked if they can’t overstay a meter by 30 seconds,” said Alice Bisno, the auto club’s manager of government affairs. “Enforcement officers need to use a certain amount of judgment. We are concerned that they operate properly, because tickets are getting so expensive.”

And the head of a West Hollywood business group has complained that private enforcement officers in that city have been overly zealous. Sheriff’s Department employees who did the job previously were “a little more compassionate toward customers and not as instantaneous” with tickets, said Michael Radcliff, president of the West Hollywood Community Alliance.

A union official for Los Angeles traffic enforcement officers predicts that the private workers will become “parking privateers,” driven to meet ticket quotas.

Julie Butcher, a spokeswoman for Service Employees International Union Local 347, noted that the city’s 500 traffic enforcement officers do much more than issue tickets. They are also responsible for directing traffic through busy intersections and at special events, for enforcing street closures and for removing abandoned vehicles from roadways.

Gordon Carpenter, a 21-year officer who works on the Westside, said any private firm will have little incentive to perform those services. “You got a car blocking your driveway at 3 in the morning now, we respond,” Carpenter said. “You want to have a block party, we respond. And when there is a disaster, you probably never give a second thought that we are there controlling the signals and moving traffic.

“The contractor is not interested in service, only in making money.”

Robert Yates, general manager of the city Department of Transportation, said the city can prevent a private firm from neglecting other traffic control duties by requiring those in the firm’s contract.

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While Riordan’s aides said they are not prejudging the outcome of the pilot program, they privately cite figures showing that private parking officers issue tickets at twice the rate of government workers.

Even the city Department of Transportation’s figures show that officers who produced up to 55 citations a day in 1990 are averaging just 36 a day this year, Yates said.

City traffic officers, or T.O.s as they call themselves, said many factors have driven the numbers down. These include higher fines that have made drivers less likely to risk tickets, the fact that vehicle registration citations are no longer issued by traffic officers, and a shift in most work schedules of traffic officers--inspired by a city hiring freeze--that has most of them spending more time directing traffic and less issuing tickets.

Moreover, they note, ticket issuance was discontinued for several days in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Butcher argued that if Riordan wants “a fair fight” on the question of who can issue the most tickets, he should arm city employees with the same high-tech gear as private industry.

Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley said the request for proposals from private firms is designed to account for such variables so a fair comparison can be made. And Riordan said during his budget address that he only wants to try private firms as a “competitive benchmark” to test the efficiency of city employees. He said that if city workers are proven to do a better job, he will hire more of them.

But Carpenter and other T.O.s said they worry that it is only a matter of time before private firms are awarded all the jobs.

“These are entry-level jobs that give people a chance to contribute to the community,” Carpenter said. “Without that, they can’t get in and get training and provide for their families. It’s Riordan’s way, but it’s not stabilizing the city.”

In the city’s poor and minority neighborhoods, Civil Service workers say they have remained a stabilizing force as manufacturing and other jobs have dwindled. Private firms’ employees probably would be paid less, work only part time and receive skimpier benefits, the opponents predict.

The mayor, however, insisted Wednesday: “I will not support privatization that relies on substandard wages or inadequate benefits.”

Jesse Johnson, who started 24 years ago as a ticket writer and now is the city’s chief of parking enforcement operations, said he sees both sides.

There are the younger workers who call in sick or take days off on seemingly minor workers’ compensation claims, Johnson said. It makes him long for the days when he started, when “there was a considerable amount of pride and a considerable amount of esprit de corps in what we were doing.”

Although he appreciates Riordan’s drive for efficiency, Johnson said, “There is something to be said for the city employee.

“People don’t see it as a job, but as a way of life,” he concluded. “It’s sad if it’s not there anymore.”