City to crack down on parking scofflaws

That is going to change. The city is going to get tougher, Mayor Dan Pike said.

It’s simply not fair to people who pay parking tickets that other drivers keep ignoring tickets, he said.

“To me, this kind of points out a problem,” he said, when shown the parking statistics. “I view that as an equity problem.”

It’s also an economic problem. The parking system is designed to keep cars circulating in and out of spots so customers can find a place to park. If they can’t find parking — the city already has a shortage of parking spots downtown — they shop elsewhere, Pike said.

Some of the outstanding tickets in that $1.5 million total go back more than a decade, said Linda Storck, director of the city’s Judicial and Support Services department. The top 10 chronic offenders alone owe the city nearly $28,000.

The city heaps fees on repeat offenders and refers them to collectors, Storck said. Last year, the city sent 6,000 tickets to collection agencies.

“Sooner or later, people decide that they want to buy a car or they need a rental agreement or sometimes even they need a job and their credit is checked and that is when they’ll come forward and pay these tickets,” she said. If the city can find their employer, it asks a judge to deduct the fines from their paychecks.

‘FREQUENT-FLIERS’

Most people who get a ticket quickly learn their lesson. Last year, for example, 76 percent of the ticketed vehicles got only one ticket, according to city statistics.

“The good news is that by far the majority of people that use our parking system do pay their parking tickets,” Storck said.

And the percentage of what city staff call “scofflaws,” repeat offenders who don’t care about parking penalties, has improved:

In 2005, 6 percent of ticketed vehicles received six or more citations.

In 2006, the figure dropped to 3.5 percent. That year, parking rates and the cost of tickets increased.

In 2007 the figure dropped slightly, to 3.2 percent. That’s a total of 728 vehicles driven by scofflaws.

Most of them got $10 tickets at expired meters.

Many of them are probably taking up spots all day that could go to customers, said Opal Mahoney, Parking Services manager at Bellingham Public Works. There are about 1,365 metered parking spaces downtown.

“You can certainly say they’re taking more than their share,” said Mahoney, who also calls scofflaws “frequentfliers.” “They’re making a dent in the spaces that are available for others.”

In January 2006, a consultant’s study concluded downtown had adequate parking but that with expected growth, the city would need another 1,700 spaces by 2022.

“It’s becoming more and more scarce and it’s becoming a significant impact on the merchants,” Mahoney said.

A LACK OF PARKING

At a June 23 City Council hearing on a proposal to remove parking along the west side of Cornwall Avenue and install bike lanes in both directions, some downtown business owners told city leaders the lack of parking downtown was hurting their business.

“There is very much a need for parking in the downtown area,” Joe Hilton, owner of Hilton’s Shoes, told the City Council. He opposed removing parking along Cornwall. “As a downtown business owner, the reality is our customers overwhelmingly are not coming to shop at my business riding bicycles. … The reality is people come in cars.”

At least one other business owner told the council that parking meter increases and ticketing drove away some of his customers.

“Are there empty retail spaces down in Fairhaven? No. Are there any meters down there? No,” said Noel Lemke, owner of Sportsman Chalet. “I don’t understand why downtown has to shoulder that responsibility.”

Pike said the city is still moving forward to put in a new parking structure to serve downtown and a future redeveloped waterfront.

LOOKING AT SOLUTIONS

In May of last year, city staff conducted an experiment. They took the top eight parking scofflaws and — for the first time — mailed them a second $25 fine for each unpaid ticket, which city law allows but which staff had never done before, said Clark Williams, transportation and communications superintendent at Public Works.

Only two of the eight responded and started making payments, he said. The other six were sent to collections again, which took more staff time.

“If you’re someone that has 100 parking tickets and you get more in the mail, what do you care?” Williams said.

Since then, staff has talked about other options, including denying scofflaws permits for city lots when they apply and having cars towed and not releasing them until outstanding fines are paid, he said.

At Western Washington University, booting the cars of repeat offenders motivates most to pay, university officials have said. A 2004 downtown parking study recommended booting chronic offenders’ vehicles to dissuade abuse and collect more money for parking services.

But Williams doesn’t think that would work.

“I truly don’t believe that the amount of money you’re going to bring in with a booting program would bring in enough money to fiscally support the program,” he said. It’s not realistic to assume booting will return the $1.5 million because that includes tickets going back more than a decade, and some of those people could be dead by now, he said. And some people may still not pay.

“Who’s going to say they’re going to pay to get a boot off their car?” he asked. “There are some people that are unwilling to pay legal infractions that they have.”

Something new must be done, said Pike, who plans discuss the issue with staff this week. He’d like to do something to deny drivers use of their cars unless they pay.

Whether towing scofflaws and demanding payment actually gets people to pay up, Frank Ordway doesn’t know.

But Ordway, chairman of the Parking Commission and executive director of the downtown American Museum of Radio and Electricity, said something must change.

“Doing what we’re doing now is not doing anything good,” he said. “It seems as if it’s worth it to try something different.”

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