Residents in the southern part of Fullerton – a predominantly working class area with a lot of overcrowded living situations – keep getting ticketed for violating parking restrictions during street sweeping hours.
They say there’s nowhere to park in the crowded part of town.
And many of them have had enough.
The citations, residents say, create an undue burden since the city started to enforce restrictions again in September.
Joshua Ferguson, a local blogger and city hall watchdog, said fining people for street sweeping parking violations was a “middle finger” to people who need their cars to get to work and said the city should reduce their penalties.
“When people have nowhere to put their much needed transportation and you punish them, instead of standing up for them it shows the true interest and intention of the city,” he said at the May 7 city council meeting.
“If there is adequate parking, then the penalties might make sense.”
Fullerton officials say not enforcing street sweeping parking rules impacts the city’s ability to thoroughly clean its streets which in turn impacts their ability to keep oils and pollutants out of their stormwater system.
Fullerton isn’t the only city in North Orange County to recently take a look at street sweeping enforcement.
In April, Brea officials voted to reinstate parking restrictions for street sweeping following an uptick in resident complaints after years of no enforcement.
[Read: Brea to Enforce Street Sweeping Requirements]
For many residents living in Fullerton’s crowded south side, a lack of parking has long plagued renters – even pitting homeowners against tenants over the years when the overnight parking bans were up for debate.
[Read: Fullerton Overnight Parking Bans Up for Debate]
The city offers exemption permits on the overnight parking ban, which stretches from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. Some neighborhoods are exempted from the ban outright if city council members find there’s not enough alternative parking – something most common in the south side, where many apartment renters live.
Now, officials in the college town are looking at potentially making changes to how they go about cleaning streets and enforcing parking restrictions with citations – which is bringing in about $100,000 a month in revenue.
Last week, city council members voted 4-0 to continue a discussion on if they want to make changes to how street sweeping runs in the city or change enforcement rules. Councilman Bruce Whitaker was not present.
Mayor Nick Dunlap said the city’s current enforcement and street sweeping approach is bad policy and even said the city should consider potentially refunding some of the residents.
“It’s important for us to not just fix the policy, but to make it right for the residents that were affected along the way,” he said. “We need to see more data and we need to see some additional options to really get this right.”
The decision to continue the debate came after staff proposed three alternatives on how to run street sweeping in the city including dropping enforcement, doing it every two weeks or cleaning alternate sides of the street every week.
Staff said changing the operation of street sweeping to alternate sides of the road could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on adjusting signs in the city, as well as up the price for their street sweeping contract.
They said switching to biweekly street sweeping would drop the cost of the contract, but still cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars to change signage.
The additional costs would come in a city that landed in the state auditor’s list of top 20 cities most likely to have financial problems in California a couple of years ago and has been struggling financially.
Taxation By Citation: Who is Getting Ticketed?
A heat map created by the city shows a concentration of the citations happening in the south side of town, a high density residential area with limited parking.
Councilman Fred Jung said the north side of town has homeowner associations that conduct their own street sweeping and that could play a factor as well.
Councilman Ahmad Zahra said the areas getting ticketed like South Fullerton are areas that have less parking options and high density apartments.
He also said the money collected was not being reinvested into the city but going back to SP+, the contractors running the citation program.
“Also, it’s the lowest income part of town so now we’re charging people to pay for a citation program to cite them and we’re not giving them options so if we aren’t trying to accommodate parking, I think we need to also accommodate this,” Zahra said.
A couple of residents, including Ferguson, raised concerns that the city was using enforcement to tax residents through citation.
“We have ridiculous inflation and countless people are living paycheck to paycheck so the very idea of shaking down residents under the guise of revenue is both gross and an abdication of the entire point of government,” Ferguson said.
City Manager Eric Levitt said it was not the city’s goal to bring in more revenue through citations.
Jung shared those concerns but didn’t like the alternatives presented by staff.
“I’m not a big fan of taxation by citation, I think government should be able to balance its books without excessively feeing its citizens,” he said. “I’d like something brought back that’s a little bit more comprehensive or leave it status quo.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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