SOUTH BAY COVER STORY : The Parking Paradox : Beach Cities’ Tough Policy on Violations Can Backfire

It was a Friday morning at Manhattan Beach City Hall, and the cash register was harmonizing with the sound of parking violators opening their wallets.

Manhattan Beach resident Mark Hardy took out two crisp $10 bills and handed them to the cashier. He said he got pinched when he parked his car and ran into a downtown coffee shop for a quick cup of java. When he came out a few minutes later, there was a ticket on his windshield.

“I just forgot to put a quarter in the meter,” he said, stashing his slightly thinner wallet in the back pocket of his shorts and shaking his head. “That was a 21-buck cup of coffee.”

Hardy’s neighbor, Laura White, understood. Moments later, she paid the same fine for a ticket she got while picking up lunch on Rosecrans Avenue the previous week. “I was all ready to get my sandwich, and then I looked out the window and, boom!, the meter guy got me,” she said. “I try not to get (tickets). I hate ‘em. But what can you do?”

Similar complaints echo across the South Bay, where a handful of coastal communities--Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach--are among the most congested areas in Southern California during summer months. Faced with critical parking shortages, these cities respond by giving out thousands of tickets each year. Hermosa Beach, for example, writes about 63,000 tickets annually--the equivalent of three per resident--and in fiscal 1992-93 collected almost $1 million from scofflaws.

Yet the parking problem is more than cops playing “gotcha” with weary motorists. Parking is inextricably linked with traffic flow, real estate planning and economic development. How a city handles parking can affect the quality of life and even the health of the business community.

Much more is at stake, in other words, than a ticket stashed beneath a windshield wiper.

Nowhere is that illustrated better than in Hermosa Beach, where a hard-nosed attitude toward parking seems to have backfired and even jeopardized the city’s economy. In recent months, city officials have moved to end decades-old restrictions that have kept businesses from expanding if they could not provide parking. Business leaders and residents say such policies were strangling growth.

“I get parking tickets all the time, and so does everybody else (who lives here),” said Robert Benz, a Hermosa Beach councilman. “Most of the tickets are written not to non-residents, but residents. It just becomes another tax.”

But Benz argues that the city’s parking problem is responsible for more than ruining a motorist’s trip to the beach. He says that restrictive parking measures “killed” the city’s downtown area. “That’s why Hermosa Beach is in such dire straits,” he said.

An engineer by profession, Benz says the parking problem is symptomatic of a larger anti-business attitude that once pervaded the city. Officials saw the goals of fostering commercial growth and building a comfortable bedroom community as mutually exclusive, he said.

Carol Hunt, executive director of the Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce, summarized the age-old problem as simply “a lot of cars in a 1.3-square-mile city.” City officials were concerned that new businesses would bring an influx of cars and worsen the parking shortage. So, beginning in the 1960s, they began placing restrictions on new businesses or firms that wanted to expand.

Zoning laws required four parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of commercial space and 10 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant space. Owners could provide half the number of required spaces if they paid the city $6,500 for each remaining space. Many small business owners who wanted to expand or remodel had to pay tens of thousands of dollars because of a lack of parking spaces.

The result? According to commercial brokers and city records, the parking restrictions caused remodeling and rebuilding in the downtown area to slow to a trickle.

In January and February of this year, city records show, Hermosa Beach issued four permits for alterations or repairs on commercial buildings, with a total estimated value of $48,900. During the same period, by comparison, neighboring Manhattan Beach issued nine permits with a total value in excess of $828,000. In March, 1993, Hermosa Beach issued just five permits, with a total value of $23,100, but Manhattan Beach issued 15, with a total value of $417,979. At that time, Manhattan Beach also issued a permit for a new commercial building, a rare occurrence for both towns these days.

“The fact that no buildings have been built (or remodeled) downtown (in Hermosa Beach) speaks for itself,” said Missy Sheldon, a commercial real estate broker in Hermosa Beach. “People were aware of the restrictions and didn’t bother” to remodel or expand.

“Our downtown is (in) a time warp,” said Jerry Newton, a Hermosa Beach attorney and chairman of the Downtown Enhancement Commission, a group of business leaders interested in revitalization. He glanced out at the weathered storefronts of T-shirt shops and swimsuit boutiques along Pier Avenue. “It’s basically the same downtown as 30 years ago.”

Benz said that although the city collects almost $1 million annually from parking fines, costs related to enforcement and administration run around $780,000 per year, a figure confirmed by city Finance Director VikiCopeland. The resulting profit is so small, Benz argued, that it hardly justifies “all the grief and pain and suffering” inflicted on local residents.

In the past two years city officials have taken a new tack. In 1992, a group of volunteer urban planners visited the city and delivered a 60-page report that recommended abandoning the parking restrictions downtown and noted that “merchants and residents alike resent overzealous enforcement of meter regulations.”

This year, the City Council dropped the old zoning requirements and is developing a plan to provide new parking and to revitalize downtown. The plan would have to be approved by the California Coastal Commission.

In addition, city officials have in recent months instructed officers to back off their take-no-prisoners approach to parking. Hermosa Beach police were once notorious for insisting on completing tickets even when motorists arrived breathlessly to put change in the meters.

“We’ve received directions to be more understanding of motorists, to try to relate to the community more, to give people the benefit of the doubt and not cite them (in borderline situations),” said Hermosa Beach Police Sgt. John Kearin.

Hermosa Beach is not the only South Bay community struggling with the problem of too many cars and not enough places to put them. Police officers in many communities say parking scofflaws help cause traffic tie-ups and block emergency vehicles.

Neighboring Manhattan Beach also aggressively tickets parking violators, collecting almost $560,000 in 1993. Any car with five or more unpaid tickets may be towed and impounded or immobilized with a Denver boot, a metal device that locks the left front wheel.

“Parking is a big problem in the coastal areas,” said Sheila Argueta, a Manhattan Beach community services supervisor, “because it’s all high-density, with houses and apartments stacked on top of one another and very narrow streets dating from the turn of the century, when they were built to handle horse-and-buggies and Model Ts.”

Redondo Beach collected $1.1 million on 43,000 tickets in just nine months from July, 1993 to March, 1994, said Budget and Finance Manager Lynell Soladay.

Farther inland, space is a bit more plentiful, but cities still enforce parking rules concerning street sweeping and fire lanes. Sgt. Stephen Baker of the Hawthorne Police Department said about 80% of the town’s 25,000 parking tickets each year are for street-sweeping violations.

South Bay cities generate so many tickets, in fact, that municipal accountants have a hard time keeping up with them. So the city of Inglewood has stepped in to help.

In recent years, Inglewood has marketed itself as the Big Brother of parking, selling its tracking and collection services to cities across the state, including Lawndale, Palos Verdes Estates and Torrance in the South Bay, and Berkeley and Palo Alto near San Francisco, said city spokesman Jim Nyman.

Inglewood’s weapon? A computer mainframe hooked up to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. If a scofflaw doesn’t pay up, Inglewood informs the DMV and prevents the car from being registered. In 1992, Inglewood also pioneered the use of legislation that allows cities to deduct outstanding fines from state tax refunds. Nyman, in the meantime, has become an outspoken advocate of get-tough parking policies.

“Parking is a decision you make,” he said. “You decide to park illegally.”

Fines can more than double for late payments. For example, motorists charged with illegally occupying a parking space intended for the disabled pay a fine of about $330. If they don’t pay within 30 days, they can owe $700 or more.

Hermosa Beach, meanwhile, is still smarting from its years of Draconian parking regulations, and reversing the town’s fortunes may prove difficult. The city was $150,000 in the red at the end of 1993, said Copeland, and Benz said another shortfall is expected this year.

Copeland said recent years have seen layoffs and other cutbacks, with the proposed elimination of three more full-time municipal jobs for 1994-95. She blamed the shortfall on the poor economy and the state’s precarious finances.

Commercial remodeling is picking up, according to city records, but building department spokeswoman Sherria Lawrence said most of the increase so far is a result of the January earthquake and quake-related retrofitting.

Above all, city officials say no amount of urban planning is going to make the parking crunch go away.

“A city the size of Hermosa Beach,” said Newton of the downtown business association, “can’t fit all the cars that come through it on a hot Sunday in August. It can’t, and it never will.”

Parking Tickets

Chart shows the number of tickets issued and revenue collected by six South Bay cities during the 1993 fiscal year. Some numbers have been rounded off by reporting officials.

City No. of Tickets Issued Total Collected Hawthorne 25,000 $500,000 Hermosa Beach 63,000 $951,000 Inglewood 80,000 $2.5 million Manhattan Beach 49,500 $559,223 Redondo Beach* 43,000 $1.1 million Torrance 13,145 $356,000

* Covers nine-month period from July, 1993, to March, 1994, only.