Atlanta's downtown parking wars could come to a head on Wednesday.
A City Council committee is scheduled to hear a proposal to temporarily stop collecting parking tickets and booting vehicles in the city.
Councilman Kwanza Hall introduced a resolution last week to impose a one-month moratorium on the program. Hall, whose district includes downtown, has been flooded with complaints that the private company the city hired to run the program is overly aggressive and wrongly ticketing motorists.
"I just felt like if we could have a little bit of time to get everybody on the same page, we could work out some of the kinks," said Hall, who estimated his office has received several hundred phone calls about the issue.
The city's Public Works Department, which oversees parking enforcement, says it is trying to address concerns about the program.
"We are increasing our efforts to ensure that the public is well informed about the city’s efforts," the department said in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Hall said he has met with the privately run program, ParkAtlanta, and city officials several times in recent months, but "every time we solve one issue, a new problem kept popping up."
Paul Luna, who opened a restaurant in downtown Atlanta earlier this year, says he's received parking tickets after enforcement hours. Luna, who said he's lost business because of the program, protested outside City Hall last week.
Late last year the city outsourced its parking enforcement to Milwaukee-based Duncan Solutions, which operates ParkAtlanta. The seven-year contract calls for the company to pay the city $5.5 million a year to manage enforcement and booting of vehicles. City officials noted Atlanta had collected about $2.1 million the prior two years from parking tickets.
Atlanta also began the process of nearly tripling the number of parking meters in the city from 900 to 2,500. Nearly all of the meters are located downtown or in Midtown. In January, a new policy took effect allowing the city to boot illegally parked cars if they have three or more parking tickets.
But the city didn't communicate the changes well, Hall says.
Some question whether ParkAtlanta can legally cite motorists. Luna noted the parking tickets have an area for the name of the officer.
"They're not officers," he said.
Hall and City Solicitor Raines Carter said they are reviewing whether there are any legal problems with the program. Nearly 90 percent of the 533 parking cases filed with the city's court system since Jan. 3 are still pending, Carter said, and some disputed tickets will be reviewed by a judge next week.
Meanwhile, the city is dealing with another potential headache. A group of Atlanta employees who enforced parking regulations and were laid off in 2008 sued the city to get their jobs back. The case is in the courts.
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