Parking Tickets: More Than Just Declining Revenues

As I have written in previous articles, City Treasurer Heather Campbell regularly mentions in her monthly Common Council meeting report that revenue from parking tickets is down, and last night was no exception.  She said that revenue typically picks up in the summer, and that she was confident it would do so soon. 

Several months ago, Heather was so concerned about the decrease in parking ticket revenues that she announced she was going to reach out to the Police Chief to see what was going on (the parking enforcers who write the meter violation tickets work for HPD).  Since then, Heather has never mentioned whether she talked with the Police Chief or if she knows what the reason(s) for the decrease continues to be. 

You may think it's a good thing that the city is issuing fewer parking tickets (primarily for meter violations), an indication that more people are filling the meters and not remaining parked beyond their allotted time.  In reality, though, the city knows the number of tickets it should be writing, based on data from previous years.  If anything, as the city becomes busier with visitors, parking ticket revenue should be increasing.  It is not, and it has been decreasing for close to a year, possibly longer. 

At April's council meeting, HPD Chief Ed Moore told us that one of his 4 parking enforcers had resigned after less than a year on the job, having been hired, in Moore's own words, "by word of mouth."   Moore also said that he had interviewed a few candidates for the open position and that he was sure one of them would work out.  Last month, Moore offered no department report, instead just giving a farewell speech.  

Last night, acting Police Chief Lt. David Miller, filling in for Police Chief Mishanda Franklin, gave the HPD report.  While Miller did mention that HPD is actively seeking to fill one police officer vacancy, he mentioned nothing about the parking enforcer vacancy.

This year, there has been exactly one employment opportunity posting on the city's website in the "articles" section.  That was on April 10th, for a part-time cemetery clerk.  There is no such thing as an Employment Opportunities page on the city's website.

Today, I caught up with one of the friendly HPD parking enforcers who has been issuing tickets for several years.  He told me that he has given notice that he will be resigning (retiring?) next month.  I asked him whether he knew if HPD had hired a fourth enforcer.  He told me that "someone was interested, but only in full time work, so he didn't work out."

It turns out that our parking enforcers are only allowed to work part time.  I asked the friendly enforcer why this was so.  "Well, they don't want to pay us benefits, that's why.  They always tell us to watch our hours, and they wonder why we aren't writing enough tickets," he replied.  My sense is that for years HPD has relied on hiring older people who are retired and may be living off a pension, primarily men who don't need health benefits or much pay.  This is called an unsustainable approach to staffing.  One of the few things that Ed Moore suggested in his farewell speech last month was, essentially, to get parking related matters out of HPD's hands and create a Parking Bureau. 

By late next month, unless another part-time parking enforcer is hired by then, we will have just two part-time enforcers writing tickets up and down Warren Street.  Both of them are no spring chickens, and I know for a fact that one of them has been talking about retiring for years.  That enforcer is also the employee who repairs our meters and collects the quarters from them.  

The current pay for a part-time parking enforcer is between $15-$16/hour.

It is pretty clear that our parking meters' days are limited, in favor of more high tech "meters" in the form of kiosks or cloud-based magic.  However, be it old meters, new meters, kiosks, phone app, or chips in the brain, whatever the city decides to do (or not to do), there will always be a need for parking enforcers to issue tickets and slap them on windshields.  If the city isn't actively seeking candidates for full time work with benefits for parking enforcement, what good does a half a million-dollar kiosk parking meter system do us? 

 

Enormous pothole at the entrance/
exit of the City Hall parking lot