Scofflaw Heaven : Parking Tickets Go Unpaid Because It Costs More to Enforce Them

Although nine cities in Ventura County are owed a total of more than $800,000 in unpaid parking tickets, none of the cities have aggressive programs to track down repeat offenders.

Oxnard has the highest number of tickets outstanding, amounting to $340,554. That would be more than enough to restore four police positions that were cut from the city’s budget in June.

But officials there and in other cities say many of the unpaid tickets were issued to out-of-state residents and other hard-to-find people. They say it’s not practical or cost-effective to hunt them down.

“Three-hundred-thousand dollars is a sizable amount,” said Oxnard Assistant City Manager John Tooker. “The question is, how much of that is truly not going to come back?”

Sgt. George Pultz of the Oxnard Police Department agreed that the city can’t afford to go after parking scofflaws routinely. “We don’t have people to search for a vehicle,” he said.

Lt. Don Arth, in charge of the Ventura Police Department’s traffic division, said Ventura’s problems with people who park illegally are not serious enough to warrant hunting them down.

“We just don’t have the sheer numbers of people who are doing that,” Arth said. “We might be spending more than we’re getting back.”

However, he said, the city is planning to increase some parking fines to $25 from the current $7 to $12.

If the increase is approved by the county’s Municipal Court Judges Bail Committee, it may become worthwhile for the city to track down offenders, he said.

As a rule, cities in Ventura County are not as tough on parking offenders as Los Angeles.

No local cities use the wheel-locking device known as the Denver Boot, which Los Angeles applies in cases where five or more tickets are outstanding. Cities in Ventura County also rarely impound cars, another Los Angeles practice.

Nor do the cities in Ventura County have as serious a problem with parking offenders as Los Angeles, which, as of April 15, 1990, had close to $249 million in unpaid parking tickets on the books.

The nine Ventura County cities that keep records issued more than 68,000 tickets in 1989. A total of 33,853 tickets, some of them dating from previous years, have not been paid.

Oxnard and Ojai contract with other agencies, based in Los Angeles and Torrance, to process parking tickets--which can include keeping track of whether tickets are paid, mailing delinquent notices and sending information on unpaid violations to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Moorpark uses Thousand Oaks to process its tickets.

Other cities in the county process the tickets themselves. Fillmore tabulates the information by hand. Santa Paula keeps no records of outstanding citations, said Brenda Monser, city spokeswoman.

Officials from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol said they write very few parking tickets in unincorporated areas of the county.

Many Ventura County cities allow a parking offender between two weeks and a month to pay a ticket before mailing a notice and adding a late fee, which is usually $10 to $20, depending on the city and the type of ticket.

If the vehicle owner still fails to pay the ticket, a notice is sent to the DMV. The state agency puts a lien against the car. In order to re-register the car, the offender must pay the ticket.

But those measures aren’t always sufficient.

Many of Oxnard’s outstanding tickets were issued to cars for which the DMV lists no registered owner, said Marjorie George, accounting manager of finance. Some of the cars were owned by people in other states.

In some cases, a violator sells the car without notifying the DMV of the new owner, she said.

Everette Garmon, revenue manager for Ventura, said people develop cavalier attitudes toward tickets when they are renting cars, using company cars or driving cars not registered in California.

Summer is an especially bad time for the county’s coastal cities, which are inundated with parking offenses when out-of-state vacationers arrive.

“If someone’s from out of state and they don’t want to pay it, there’s no way we’re going to collect,” said Jim Hanks, finance director in Port Hueneme.

The top offender in the county has 65 outstanding tickets, worth $1,005 to the city of Ventura, Garmon said. The next-highest violator has 28 unpaid tickets and owes $476 to Ventura, he said.

Cities occasionally go after particularly brazen offenders.

Oxnard police, who keep a list of habitual parking offenders, made sure to impound one car that had accrued $800 in unpaid tickets, Pultz said.

Police went to the address where the man was usually ticketed, found the car and impounded it, he said.

Port Hueneme officials were irritated by a man who continued to park his motorcycle in a red zone near the Port Hueneme Naval Construction Battalion Center, Hanks said.

Officers staked out the area after issuing the man’s third ticket and warned him against parking there again.

The fifth ticket brought more than a warning. It marked one of the rare occasions when the city impounded a vehicle.

“That was a special case,” Hanks said. “It became a game.”

Usually, Hanks said, the city relies on the DMV to force a person to pay rather than meting out punishment to scofflaws.

“Normally, we try to keep low-key,” Hanks said. “We prefer everyone obey the law and not have to do these kinds of things.”

Other scofflaws have made getting tickets a habit. They collect their tickets and come in about every three months to pay off the fines, said Garmon of Ventura.

“We do have people who come in and plunk down $300 to $400 in tickets,” he said. “We’re aghast but that’s what they do.”

OUTSTANDING PARKING TICKETS IN VENTURA CO.

No. of tickets No. of unpaid City per year* tickets Fines owed Oxnard 18,516 11,862 $340,554 Thousand Oaks 13,267 9,418 $164,268 Ventura 22,000 4,992 $118,087 Simi Valley 4,211 2,640 $95,000 Port Hueneme 5,696 2,520 $73,000 Camarillo 1,475 1,139 $22,884 Ojai 1,346 527 $8,821 Moorpark 1,520 557 $8,432 Fillmore 437 198 $2,476 Santa Paula not available not available not available

* Calendar year 1989 or fiscal year ending June 30, 1990. Source: city officials.