By MORNING WOOD Daily Planet Slave
(Editor’s note: This is the third article in a series examining the multi-million business of parking tickets in Santa Monica.)
By Morning Wood
Daily Planet Slave
In their ongoing quest to fuel city coffers, officials announced this week they will install 24-hour-a-day parking meters on every residential street in Santa Monica.
“Alleys are next,” said Linda Loosechange, City Hall’s parking boss. “I can’t believe nobody thought of this before.”
The ambitious plan entails more than 80,000 new parking meters, which will be phased in over the next month before the busy tourist season this summer. Meter rates will be jacked up to $2 an hour. Only nickels will be accepted.
Manufactured by Walletectomy Inc., an aerospace company, the new meters scan vehicle license plates as a car pulls up and automatically issue a ticket when the meter expires. It also issues tickets for cars that stay longer than one hour in a single spot.
3E6,“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Gladys Achinback, 86, who’s lived near the beach for 86 years. “When I was a girl, these roads weren’t even paved.”
Achinback was one of thousands of residents who for years has relied on a preferential parking zone around her home, where only residents can park. Those zones will be abolished as the parking meters are installed over the next month. Meanwhile, shots rang out in the Pico neighborhood.
While the move is expected to cost City Hall more than $40 million, it will easily pay for itself. Meter revenue is expected to exceed $10 million a year and tickets will generate an estimated $60 million to $80 million each year. But that may not be enough.
Officials said by 2009 they plan to take over all public parks and turn them into metered parking spaces too.
“Soccer fields, jungle gyms, the pond at Douglas Park — these places are just sitting there,” Loosechange said Wednesday. “I mean, the city’s isn’t making one penny from any of them.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 1, 2004. Read the original PDF.