 "Photo: Beau Torres")
The City of Atlanta’s transportation subcommittee on parking enforcement, led by Councilman Michael Julian Bond, will meet at the Capitol to present recommendations gathered from the subcommittee’s efforts since a 30-day parking moratorium began. The meeting is at 9:30 a.m. on June 4.
The pause on booting, towing and ticketing is a result of Atlanta’s newly privatized parking procedures. The city outsourced parking enforcement last fall, signing a seven-year contract with PARKatlanta that guarantees an income of $5.5 million for the city each year. Since its enactment, some residents have complained of broken meters, being wrongly ticketed, and receiving inadequate notice of new regulations.
Councilman Kwanza Hall, whose district includes much of the downtown and midtown areas where metered parking is abundant, said he received the brunt of those gripes.
“After years of little or no enforcement, all of [a] sudden we had new meters, new signs and new procedures,” Hall said.
With unanimous support from council colleagues, Hall introduced the moratorium legislation.
“The moratorium was the only means that we had, as legislators, to take this new car to the shop, so to speak, and look under the hood,” he said.
Hall said it was clear that Atlanta residents didn’t have satisfactory preparation for the private company’s new measures, which include 24-hour monitoring of meters.
“On the GSU campus alone, new meters with new time limits were appearing up and down Courtland and Gilmer and other places,” Councilman Hall said.
Sophomore Addel Camara believes he was wrongly ticketed by the private company while parked at a meter on campus.
“They were really going crazy with the tickets,” he said. “They gave me two tickets on the same day.”
Councilman Bond pointed out that, according to city code, parking monitoring can be enforced 24 hours each day, six days per week.
“We’ve received two recommendations within the subcommittee for an alternative to that proposal,” he said.
Some groups have recommended monitoring only Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. Another group suggested a similar time frame with the addition of conditional parking enforcement on Saturdays, depending on events scheduled for the area.
Within the complaints about the new parking measures is the disagreement about whether or not a private company can legally issue tickets to residents.
Bond generally does not support government privatization of any kind.
“I was not in office when that contract was discussed,” he said. “So we’re kind of batting clean-up a little bit as we go through this process.”
But Bond explained that the city’s law department said it is within the city’s authority to enlist a private company for parking enforcement.
Because most parking offenses are categorized as criminal offenses, some residents believe ticketing, towing and booting should only be enforced by a government agency. According to Bond, the city solicitor agrees.
“There are questions between the solicitor’s office and the city’s law department, which are both independent of one another, because…every traffic offense, with the exception of red light tickets…is considered criminal,” Bond said. “Then the issue becomes whether or not those cases can be prosecuted by a third party–a person acting on behalf of the city. But for our purposes as a sub-group…so that we could engage in work, we went under the premise that the city attorney is the prevailing legal win. So we move forward based on that,” he said.
The legality of PARKatlanta’s contract with the city will be discussed, said Hall.
“If we learn that an outside company contracting with the city is not allowed to use unsworn officers to write tickets, I suspect they’ll simply start hiring off-duty sworn officers,” he said.
Both Hall and Bond feel it’s still unclear whether the agreement with PARKatlanta was a good or bad move for the city.
“Like lots of cities across the country, the city of Atlanta was looking to save money and improve the efficiency of some of its operations,” Hall said of the city’s decision to privatize parking enforcement.
“I don’t think anyone felt the city was doing a very good job of parking enforcement when it was done in-house. I supported the decision to contract with PARKatlanta. That said, I wish the council had been better informed about the details…and plans to roll out the program,” he said.
“Council members have their pulse on the communities they serve. We could have provided a lot of guidance to the city’s public works department as they wrote the [contract] and planned the rollout,” he said.
One of the suggestions Bond’s subcommittee has received is to implement public service announcements, robo-calls, direct mailing and other forms of communicating information about new parking measures to city residents. Other requests include more prominently displayed appeal instructions on tickets and an interactive map on the city’s web site detailing locations of meters, enforcement signs and residential parking permit programs.
The moratorium is scheduled to end at 9 p.m. on June 10. Bond believes the time-out won’t be extended due to potentially “severe financial penalties.”
“We’ve already received a letter from [PARKatlanta] saying that they’re not going to make their June payment because of the moratorium. And they are seeking an additional credit for their June payment because of other conditions within the contract,” he said.
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