Parking enforcement, Atlanta drivers collide

At public meetings, on websites, around dinner tables, angry citizens are grousing about what they perceive as aggressive and nitpicky ticketing.

It’s been a year since the city of Atlanta turned parking enforcement over to a private company, Milwaukee-based Duncan Solutions, doing business as PARKatlanta. The arrangement, critics say, makes for a motivated vendor: The more tickets the company writes, the more money it makes.

And that has created a clash in cultures, pitting a population used to ready, easy and cheap on-street parking with a brutally efficient enforcement operation.

Down the road from Friendship Baptist, at The Cake Hag, bakery owner Maggie Sweeney has a sign taped to her window: We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone Affiliated with PARKatlanta.

Others are seething, as well.

Harold Olsen, a retired property manager, attended a public hearing this month to vent his outrage to city and PARKatlanta officials. Olsen parked downtown, put $6 in the meter but didn’t get a receipt. To be safe, he swiped his debit card — once on purpose, once by mistake — for two more charges totaling $8.50. He also left a couple of bucks with a nearby merchant to pump into a meter if his time ran low. Somehow the time didn’t register, and he still got a $25 ticket.

“The city can’t do its own enforcement, so they hire an out-of-town outfit to do the dirty work and rob its citizens,” he said last week, still peeved. “It seems the dummies at City Hall haven’t thought through the process.”

Since taking over, PARKatlanta has created more than 1,700 metered spaces. According to the contract with the city, in exchange for $5.5 million annually, the firm manages meters and writes tickets for illegal parking. The contract is good until 2016.

Anderson Moore, PARKatlanta’s program manager, said the company is trying to make parking enforcement clearer to the public. He said the company has attended 45 civic meetings to get the word out and has installed 7,000 signs. “When individuals park, there should be very little question about what they can or can’t do,” he said.

Residential areas next

Privatized parking enforcement is a growing trend and almost always stirs passions, said Shawn Conrad, executive director for the International Parking Institute in Virginia.

“But nothing reached the level that you’ve seen in Atlanta,” he said, referring to the contentious hearings and angry complaints. “Absolutely not.”

“Parking can be very emotional,” he added.

The reaction in Atlanta, he said, comes from a history of spotty enforcement and a poor effort of letting the public know what was coming.

A rash of complaints from residents and small merchants earlier in the year caused the City Council to call for a 30-day enforcement moratorium, giving the city time to draw up different parking zones with various time limits and days of operation. In July, the council voted to increase time limits at some meters and eliminate overnight parking restrictions.

So, as the scope of meter violations dried up, PARKatlanta went to residential areas to write tickets for infractions like parking the wrong way or being too close to a crosswalk, said City Councilman Michael Julian Bond.

“It hit people where they live,” said Bond, a new council member who was given the job of reviewing and rewriting parking policy. “It’s your personal space on your block. This has been a huge culture shift to residents. And the citizens are not going along quietly.”

Bond said a step-down in enforcement may be needed, which would mean smaller payments from PARKatlanta. At the public meeting, Bond noted the city voided a contract that privatized its water service. “That may be the way this one goes,” he said.

Unforeseen challenges

The city disbanded most of its 28-person parking enforcement team in May 2008 to save money, but then it suffered a double whammy: Parking revenue plummeted, and it faced a multimillion-dollar budget deficit.

The council voted 13-0 in July 2009 to adopt the contract, which went into effect four months later. “When you’re in financial turmoil, that money sounds pretty good,” said Councilman H. Lamar Willis, who long supported privatizing some city services. “The city just wasn’t good at collecting parking fees.”

During the first year of operations, PARKatlanta collected $3.5 million in citations — $2.4 million in new tickets, and $1.1 million of the $5 million in delinquent ticket revenue it was allowed to go after. This was $1 million more than fiscal 2008, the last year the city had a full complement of enforcement employees.

“We should have asked more questions” about how the program would be operated, Willis now concedes. “None of us anticipated the challenges of us changing our parking program. If we dug deeper, someone might have thought differently.”

But canceling the contract seems unrealistic, he said. The city would have to pay PARKatlanta about $14 million to end the contract, officials say. Plus, the city would forego the $5.5 million annual income promised for six more years.

“Now you’re talking about a $40 million decision,” Willis said. “That’s a bitter pill to swallow.”

Atlanta Public Works Commissioner Richard Mendoza, the department’s fourth since the contract went into effect, said he is negotiating with PARKatlanta, which wants to reduce some of its payments to the city because of the reduced meter hours. He is against canceling the contract.

Double-paying

PARKatlanta has 33 non-sworn employees and 35 off-duty or retired Atlanta police officers working for the firm. They wrote 135,706 tickets in the first year of operation. On-duty Atlanta officers have written another 15,042 since January, with the money from those tickets going to the city.

According to city figures, Atlanta averaged about 150,000 parking tickets a year from 2002 to 2008.

Atlanta had about 800 functioning meters when the contract went into effect last year. Now there are 2,560 metered spaces. Wireless technology lets passing enforcement agents instantly know which spaces are unpaid. Motorists, however, do not know which empty spaces have time left on the meters, so double-paying for spaces is routine.

Mendoza said he does not know how much the meters make. “I have not seen their business model,” he said. A PARKatlanta representative referred calls to the city.

Mendoza said the contract anticipates that each space should earn $17 per day. Based on that estimate, the city’s meters would earn $43,520 a day or $11.3 million based on a year of five-day weeks (three of the city’s four parking quadrants have six-day enforcement).

“It’s not the government’s business to profit off its citizens,” said Garn McCown, a Buckhead resident who helps administer a Facebook page called Fire PARKatlanta. “But if there are profits to be made, then it should stay here to hire more police officers. You’re looking at $4 million to $5 million leaving the city. That does not make me happy.”

In theory, business owners should support such enforcement. But many argue the opposite, that the meters and enforcement chases customers away.

Sweeney, who runs a bakery on Mitchell Street not far from City Hall, has had her car booted and said the enforcement is so ruthless that it is scaring away customers. “It’s going to kill businesses,” she said.

Bruce Teilhaber, owner of Friedman’s Shoes, a fixture for more than 50 years, said businesses downtown must work harder to pull customers in.

“If they get a ticket, they aren’t coming back,” said Teilhaber, who often walks out to the street to help people fumbling around with the multispace machines.

Parking changes have caused residents and visitors to rethink how they live, work and play.

Midtown resident Gabriel Staples said his neighborhood is deemed an entertainment area, meaning meter parking is enforced until 10 p.m. and on Saturdays.

“Even on weekends, we can’t have people over,” he said. “If I have a college football party, it’s $2 an hour [for visitors to park]. There’s less and less people who will come down here.”

And the change limits where people go, a point repeated in several interviews. “If I meet friends, they want to go to places with off-street parking,” Staples said.

City officials say that is not a bad thing. Having more motorists park in lots frees up spaces for those who come and go.

That’s the way Adrianne Shoemake-Lovett sees it. Walking her beat in the Fairlie-Poplar district, Shoemake-Lovett, a meter enforcement agent who worked for the city before being hired by PARKatlanta, studies her handheld device to see which vehicles are not paid up. She stops at an SUV parked across from the federal appeals courthouse. It has a reflective police vest displayed in the driver’s window — an age-old symbol cops use to ward off parking tickets. She starts writing.

Asked if she’s breaking some unwritten pact by issuing a ticket, Shoemake-Lovett shrugs. “That has nothing to do with it,” she said. “We’re writing a violation. That’s the rules.”

COMPARISON BY CITY

City - Meters

New York - 68,000

Baltimore - 10,980

Detroit - 4,970

New Orleans - 3,671

Tampa - 3,014

Atlanta - 2,560

Grand Rapids, Mich. - 2,300

Las Vegas - 2,111

Charlotte - 1,200

Source: Walker Parking Consultants, 2007 survey

PARKING ZONES

On-street parking in Atlanta is enforced according to the various zones.

Source: PARKatlanta

MEET OUR REPORTER

Bill Torpy is a general assignment reporter for the AJC. He joined the newspaper in 1990.

He has covered many high-profile legal cases, including former Mayor Bill Campbell’s corruption trial and the 2006 Atlanta police shooting of Kathryn Johnston, as well as numerous stories around the state.

A native of Chicago, Torpy is a graduate of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and previously worked for the Daily Southtown in Chicago. He got a lot more parking tickets in Chicago than he has in Atlanta, dozens more.