Ventura Police Targeting Repeat Parking Violators : Crackdown: Plan calls for towing vehicles with five or more unpaid tickets. More than $94,000 is owed.

Cracking down on parking scofflaws, Ventura police announced plans Tuesday to start towing away vehicles with five or more unpaid tickets.

Police will aggressively track down such vehicles and impound them at the owner’s expense, said Ventura Police Cpl. John Turner, who is overseeing the crackdown.

“If you owe money, you owe money,” Turner said. “It’s not fair for me to accept money from someone who is paying their fine and not go after people who don’t.”

As of April 30, the city recorded 155 vehicles with five or more unpaid parking tickets, for a total of more than $94,000 in fines owed, Turner said.

With the new initiative--known as the Delinquent Repeat Offender Program--Ventura police will become the most aggressive law enforcement agency in the county in going after repeat parking violators, officials said.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and the Oxnard and Simi Valley police departments rarely impound cars and typically send notices to the Department of Motor Vehicles when parking offenders don’t pay up. The state agency puts a lien against the vehicle, and the offender cannot re-register it until the ticket is paid.

That has been Ventura’s procedure, Turner said. In interviews a few years ago, Ventura police officials said the city’s illegal parking problem was not serious enough to warrant tracking down parking violators.

But Ventura police decided to abandon that policy after a state law went into effect last year allowing cities to tow away vehicles with multiple citations.

“I spent nearly a year placing DMV holds, sending out late notices, using a softer approach,” Turner said. “Now we’re going after the repeat offenders.”

Ventura City Atty. Peter D. Bulens conceded that towing cars is a “drastic solution, but we haven’t solved the problem any other way.”

Ventura officials said summer is a particularly bad time for the county’s coastal cities, which are inundated with out-of-town vacationers who often ignore parking laws.

Oxnard Police Sgt. George Pultz hailed Ventura’s tougher approach but said tracking down the offending vehicles won’t be easy.

“Sometimes they’re hard to find,” Pultz said. “They’re not that easy to locate. I wish them the best of luck.”

Turner said he will have five police officers conducting periodic sweeps. He declined to say when police will start having cars towed because he does not want to alert residents who might hide their cars in a garage.

“It could be tomorrow morning or next week,” he said Tuesday. “I want to leave it as nebulous as possible.”

But Turner did say at least one sweep will be finished by the end of next week.

Each offender targeted for the sweep has received at least three notices, plus a letter from Turner warning that the car might be impounded. Turner said he decided to go after repeat offenders from 1991 to the present.

Police plan to hold the cars until payments are received. If unclaimed, the vehicles will be sold by one of the city’s three tow companies.

Turner said he doesn’t expect that everyone whose car is impounded to cough up the money, although payment plans can be arranged.

“They’ll look at how much they owe, and they’ll look at their car and wave goodby,” Turner said.

The worst offender in the city, who has 15 tickets and whose vehicle is unregistered, owes about $2,800 in parking fines, Turner said.

Money generated by the parking fines will go into the city’s general fund.