6.1.A. SR 11-20-2006 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Much like issuing license plates to vehicles, where the State issues the plate - the owner is responsible for putting it on the right car, and short of the occasional traffic arrest that occurs to a small percentage of all drivers here in the state, there is no other compliance policy in place to insure that the right plate is being used on the right car. The trust is placed upon the vehicle owner to use the plate in the right manner. We currently spend approximately 4 hours a day chalking tires, checking to see if the vehicles have moved, and then issuing tickets and following up on those tickets with the appropriate reports and data entry. The two employees who enforce the downtown parking, have an average wage of $20.62 @ hour. That equates to a cost of parking enforcement in hourly wages at $21,444 a year. Kathy Anderson averages two new or reissued permits each week, and she is responsible for entering the permit data. She spends about one hour each week, updating or mailing out permits, for a yearly wage cost of $1,264. We have spent over $2,000 thus far on permits, our parking tickets are printed up at a cost of $480 each year, and there are additional costs for unpaid tickets, prosecution and court time and other related costs. On average though, the parking detail downtown utilizes $25,000 in employee time to implement, record and enforce the parking restrictions. Any changes to the current system, such as possibly ordering new permits and reissuing them in January, will incur additional costs. From a law enforcement stand, we dedicate a tremendous amount of our resources to an issue that is driven by space constraints, not scofflaws who violate the parking limits and utilize enforcement as a tool to insure parking space compliance. A perfect analogy to use would be a poorly designed road. We could post a very low speed limit sign and issue many speeding tickets ona roadway that was way too small, poorly designed and unsafe for passage to begin with, or we could fix the road. In this case, the parking situation and amount of spots is the concern, and the permitting and enforcement process is not the answer. I advocate changing either the way employees park downtown, or working to create additional space to alleviate the congestion and provide a long term solution to an ancient problem in our downtown area. Attachments: Residential and Business Parking Permits Summary