Angelenos Paying High Price for Parking Crackdowns

Tale of the city No. 862208631 begins one year, seven months, eight days and $353 ago. It is 3:32 p.m. on a Monday in March. In broad daylight, an accountant named Kenneth M. Landon parks his 1995 Saab outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration at 500 W. Temple St. for 10 minutes while he drops off some papers. A parking ticket is fluttering on the windshield when he returns.

The ticket dings Landon to the tune of $269 for parking in a bus zone. This incenses the 50-year-old accountant, who has been parking in this space without repercussions for years. “The officer hadda be blind or something,” is how Landon will later put it. He whips out his camera and commences snapping. His photos reveal no red paint on the curb, no bus zone sign and one “no stopping” sign with an arrow implying it’s OK to park where he did. He writes to the city contesting the fine.

Coincidentally, the city controller issues an audit within weeks, carping that bad tickets and parking officer errors are costing the city more than a half-million dollars a year in dismissed citations. No matter. One month and two weeks after the audit, Landon gets a letter from the city’s Parking Violations Bureau saying that bus zone signs were in full view. Landon goes back and finds none, but notes that the “no stopping” sign with the telltale arrow has mysteriously been removed.

He takes more pictures and writes to the mayor. “This is a terrible injustice,” the accountant types furiously, referring to the photos (Exhibit III). The mayor forwards his letter. Six days later, the Parking Violations Bureau writes to say that they’re suspending the citation while they give his case another look-see. Landon expects exoneration. Clearly, he is unaware of the forces arrayed against him. By the end of the fiscal year in which he is cited, the chastened parking control folks will have jacked up ticket revenues to record levels.

By autumn, an $18 delinquency notice has come in the mail.

One of the longer-running Los Angeles dramas is its struggle to reach some happy medium on parking enforcement. Depending on the year, L.A. is crackdown city or hopelessly permissive (see the 1996 controversy over whether the big Ford dealer, Bert Boeckmann, owed the city for 249 unpaid parking tickets or only eight of them). These last couple of years seem to have fallen into the crackdown category: City parking officials have estimated that, of the 3.2 million or so parking tickets that will be written in L.A. this year, 80% will be collected upon within three years. Among big cities, it is said, this is high.

In the fiscal year in which Landon was ticketed, the city made a record $91.2 million from parking tickets. This year, according to the city controller, the figure was up to $92.8 million. Next year’s take is projected at $95.1 million. Suffice it to say that Los Angeles, in the last couple of years, has gone aggro in the collection department.

This would have been fine with Kenneth M. Landon if he’d been in the wrong, but he wasn’t. The delinquency notice made his blood boil. He called to complain and was reassured that he owed nothing while the investigation was pending. Two days after Christmas, another delinquency notice came in the mail.

More time passed. For a while, the state wasn’t going to let him renew his Saab’s registration because of the pending ticket. The debt was rising--fines, late penalties, collection fees. He was sending all his correspondence by certified mail at $10 and $20 per packet. Landon, too, had decided to go aggro. City parking officials estimate that, overall, only about 8% of the tickets issued in L.A. get contested, and only about 4.6% get reversed. The odds were lousy, but Landon didn’t care about the practical loss; he wanted the moral victory. “It was,” he insists now, “the principle of the thing.”

The one-year anniversary of his ticket was marked with another delinquency notice, but no resolution. Finally, the city wrote to say that they’d concluded their probe and decided they were in the right. Landon demanded an administrative appeal. The hearing officer glanced at the pictures and then proceeded to ignore them. Landon paid up but appealed again to Municipal Court.

And finally prevailed, winning in court. Jimmy L. Price, chief of parking enforcement for the city, says parking enforcement around public buildings has been stepped up in recent years, since the Oklahoma City bombing, but he’s not sure why Landon--whose case wrapped up last month--had such an ordeal.

Landon’s not buying. “What happens to people who aren’t as persistent as I was?” he wonders now as he waits for his refund on Citation No. 862208631. The check should have arrived by now, of course, but that is another tale.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.