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Mayor Agrees To Meet With Angry Parking Ticket Victims Association
The dreaded parking ticket in L.A. (Photo by Atwater Village Newbie via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
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If you're frustrated with getting $73 parking tickets on those annoying street-sweeping days, you're not alone. The Los Angeles Parking Freedom Initiative is a grass-roots group trying to make it known that they're less than enthused about the parking ticket sitch in L.A. The group is making some headway: Mayor Eric Garcetti announced on Thursday that he's creating a panel to hear them out and chat about the ways they can solve some of our parking ticket woes.
The founder of the Los Angeles Parking Freedom Initiative, Steven Vincent, told the L.A. Times that they want to talk to Garcetti about lowering the costs of fines, making parking signs less confusing (come on, who has time to read the parking restrictions of five different signs on one pole?) and increasing the parking hours on certain streets.
Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Parking Freedom Initiative group blasted Garcetti's recently-released budget plan to hire 50 more part-time parking enforcement officers, reported KABC. Seems like he heard them loud and clear since the panel group was announced a couple of days later. A line in the budget noted that hiring the additional staff would help add an estimated $5 million annual revenue garnered from parking tickets, reported the L.A. Daily News.
The grass-roots group claimed the additional officers would hand out more tickets and that the city was too focused on generating revenue from parking citations. However, Garcetti's team said the increased staff would help with special events, traffic control and reduce overtime.
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There were 2.6 million tickets issued last year and a total of $150 million in revenue from the fines, according to the Daily News. Garcetti won't be raising the cost of parking citations, though (which include $73 for parking during street-cleaning or $63 for parking at an expired meter).
The Los Angeles Parking Freedom Initiative hopes to change the parking policies on the March 2015 municipal ballot.
"What we want is real, systemic reform," Vincent told the Times.
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