Dear editor,
Two weeks ago, the City Council agenda included an item for consideration of parking fee increases for downtown public parking facilities. It was a good test to see if the surrounding neighborhood could be protected from the inevitable parking intrusion that happened last Saturday. The eighth time was the charm for the Culver City Car Show.
After seven years of neighborhood intrusion, authorities decided to simply enforce the existing permit parking zones for the car show. What a concept. The focused enforcement resulted in 54 tickets. Of those, 38 were related to hourly/permit violations. Can parking enforcement officials sustain this level of enforcement of the current residential permit zone signage when the city eliminates two hours of free parking in the structures?
People looking for free and convenient parking have simply parked in the residential neighborhood for the last eight years – since the movie theatre was built. The restaurants and bars have just added to the neighborhood intrusion.
When the theatre was built in 2003, the city allowed residents of Van Buren Place to sign a petition that would allow for resident-only parking (parking by permit only) between 6 p.m. Friday and midnight Sunday. The first weekend that the signs and permits were enforced, between 60 and 70 tickets were issued to violators. Unfortunately, the residents were unprotected weekdays and weeknights.
The person who got the original petition signatures went to the city for relief. He was told that they could change the signs to one-hour parking from noon to midnight, seven days a week, if he had another signed petition and paid for new signs. The residents could not have both what they had before and the new one-hour parking. They had to pick one. They mistakenly thought that the one-hour residential parking zones would be enforced.
Enforcement requires a parking enforcement officer to mark the tires of vehicles without a permit parking pass. The officer has to walk two blocks and chalk vehicle tires on one side of the street, then walk back and chalk tires on the other side of the street. The officer has to then come back one hour later. It doesn’t work because of a lack of manpower.
The city has since come up with a different parking district concept. So if the residents get a third petition signed and buy a third version of the signs, they can have the original 2003 protection back, along with the current one-hour parking during the week, which lacks the manpower to routinely enforce.
Cary Anderson,
Culver City