SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Parking Program Is Biased, Council Told

More than 100 Spanish-speaking residents packed City Hall this week to protest a new neighborhood parking program they consider discriminatory.

The Capistrano Villas residents, many with their families, told the City Council on Tuesday that they were not properly notified in Spanish that they now need stickers to park on the streets outside their homes at night. As a result, some have received at least a dozen $27 parking tickets, they said.

“It has been one year of negotiations and not on one occasion did a Spanish-speaking person get invited to represent the views of the residents,” said Nativo V. Lopez, the director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, who demanded that the council end the program.

Sylvia K. Stanley, a resident of the nearly 900-unit Capistrano Villas condominium community, told the council the new program, created to alleviate parking problems in the neighborhood, was created by only a few of the homeowners who “discriminated against the rights of these people.”

“I am extremely agitated,” Stanley said. “The city has allowed a few individuals to represent the community. . . . You have wronged my community and you have wronged me.”

The speakers were referring to a parking program instituted May 1 that requires all residents of the villas to appear before a parking committee with their driver’s licenses and vehicle registration to get stickers.

By mid-March, Orange County sheriff’s deputies had begun ticketing cars parked on the public streets from 3 to 5 a.m. without the stickers, said Jennifer Murray, an assistant to the city manager.

Murray denied that residents weren’t property notified, saying several newsletters--in English and in Spanish--outlining the new parking restrictions have been distributed.

“There is a long history of parking problems in that neighborhood,” Murray said Wednesday. For more than a year, the city has worked with residents of the villas to find a parking solution, and for the first two weeks of the program, deputies issued warnings instead of tickets, Murray said.

City Councilman Jeff Vasquez joined in criticizing the program Wednesday. Vasquez did not support it when it was adopted by the council in January.

“It is obvious by the comments that there are some discriminatory practices occurring,” Vasquez said. “It sounds like there are some problems we have to fix. I think you will see these problems modified substantially.”

City officials vowed to work with the residents to find a compromise and scheduled a meeting with community representatives for 9 a.m. Saturday at City Hall.

“The last thing we would ever want to do is discriminate against anybody, particularly in this community where we are so proud of our Hispanic heritage, “ Mayor Collene Campbell said.