http://cbs13.com/seenon/Call.Kurtis.Consumer.2.464134.html
May 16, 2006
Call Kurtis: LA Parking Tickets
by Kurtis Ming
SACRAMENTO (CBS 13) ― Art Blakeman and Dominick Puma haven't driven in Los Angeles for years, if ever. Yet both made a very special mailing list, courtesy of the Los Angeles parking bureau.
In fact, art made it twice in three-days.
"I'm like, why am I getting a parking ticket out of Los Angeles? I haven't been there in years…I Discovered it has my wife's license plate number on it, but it doesn't match the car that I own," says Blakeman.
The car's license plate says "Rosalie", but the ticket says her plates on a maroon Ford, not a 2002-Nissan Altima. And besides, Art says his wife was at work at a Sacramento Wal-Mart when the ticket was written in Los Angeles.
But LA parking was just getting started. Two-days later, Art got notice of another ticket there with his name on it. This time the license plate doesn't even match the one on the ticket.
We've learned the city of Los Angeles has an army of 500 cops who do nothing but write parking tickets and get offending cars and trucks towed. This prodigious pack of pencil-pushers churns out about 3.25 million parking tickets a year. They're like an aggressive army capturing drivers' cash to the tune of about $110 million annually.
Sacramentan Dominick Puma knows about armies. He fought his way across the Pacific with the US combat engineers. But he says his traffic tormentors from Los Angeles are in a class by themselves.
Like Art Blakeman, Dominick got a ticket from the city of angels. He hadn't been there since the 1931, and that was on the train. Plus, it was for a truck, not his Ford Escort. He says the DMV and other traffic enforcers agreed there was a mistake but they weren't just about to tangle with the la traffic bureau.
"They've got their own system and how to work, and one doesn't jump on the other, and stuff like that," he says.
Dominick got that ticket in 2004, and the story made it all the way to the Los Angeles times, but it took five months to finally beat it. And still no real answer to why so many people get parking tickets from Los Angeles without the benefit of a visit.
"They turned it over the Los Angeles District Attorney, and all that, and then he comes out with a decision there, that the system isn't perfect, there are always some cracks in the system, and I happened to fall into the crack," says Dominick.
CBS 13 spent a month and a half trying to get answers from the City of Los Angeles and when we started to feel like we were getting the runaround, we hopped aboard an airplane, and came to the Department of Transportation.
After weeks of searching, we finally set up an interview with the great Oz of LA traffic.
The man behind the curtain is chief analyst for traffic management, Robert Andalon, and he agrees there are some problems.
"There appears to be certain, either data entry problem, or a transposition problem that occurs," he says,
In other words, "eyes" get swapped with ones, and other letters and numbers get transposed, too. But Andalon assured us the traffic bureau has a very low error rate, about .5% but then he put it a different way.
"We write over 10 or 12,000 citations a day. The error rate is about 100-150 citations that have this problem," he says.
150 bogus parking tickets a day? That got us thinking, and our meter running! At $25 dollars a ticket, 150 tickets a day, say 360 days a year, no tickets on big holidays. That adds up to $1,350,000 dollars a year! And it's all a big mistake.
So what about Art Blakeman?
"I will verify, and make sure that a cancellation notice goes out to him so he has proof that, in fact, it was verified," said Andalon.
And what about everybody else?
"If you feel that there are more, just send us a list, and we'll be happy to respond to all of them," said Andalon.
