Revenues Way Down from Parking Enforcement

On Tuesday, Paul Navazio, the City Finance Directory presented the Mid-Year Budget Update. One area of serious short fall is in the area of parking citations and moving violations. The current revenue is 28.6% of the budgeted figure and they have now subsequently reduced the overall revenue estimate by over $700,000 to $778,567. This figure represents only 51.5% of the original budget estimate. As one can clearly see, this represents not a small shortfall but would could only be described as a massive shortfall.

Perhaps the most alarming factor is that this shortfall comes after a massive capital investment in both cameras at intersections and also new parking enforcement vehicles equipped with GPS locators. City planners had expected that these new enforcement mechanisms would make it easier to catch violators and thus increase the revenue.

Approved in May of 2005, this system was put into place due to a number of concerns. First, efficiency, the parking enforcement officers were said to not be able to effectively monitor all regulated districts in the City. This system would be capable of scanning over 1000 license plates per hour and would therefore increase both the area covered by a single officer and the number of vehicles that can be monitored. Moreover it would eliminate the chalk marking system and therefore eliminate the problem of violators removing the chalk marks rather than moving their vehicles.

This system was authorized at $81,000 one-time fee plus a $14,000 maintenance.

The obvious sell of that system from the staff report was this was a way to catch more violators. Instead, what has happened is that the new technology combined with the stricter prohibitions against reparking have encouraged citizens to take more care when parking to avoid citations and fines. In other words, the enforcement system is so good, that it has taken away incentive for people to violate the system.

The result of this expenditure for new technology has been a drastic decline in the number of citations and thus a massive shortfall from the projected budgeted revenue.

In previous blog entries we have lamented the fact that the city relies on fines as a source of revenue.

It is probably the reparking rules more than the new GPS enforcement vehicles that has led to the fewer citations. The budget shortfall would probably be worth it if the new policies freed up parking in the core downtown area. However, that does not appear to be the case. As we have written in the past, vehicles are now simply rotating from street to street and block to block rather than occupying a single space. The net result is the lack of street parking.

There are a number of lessons here. First, technology can at times be a double-edged sword. If the city's goal was to maintain a steady revenue from parking citations, they would have been better served not trying to fix a system that was already working well. The city got a bit too greedy believing that they could create a system that would be more efficient and would catch those who would have erased the chalk rather than moving the car. What I think they did not anticipate is that those people in a chalkless system would simply move their car.

Second, the city should not be budgeting revenue from fines. That leads to a perverse incentive structure where the city relies on people violating the law and when people do not violate the law, rather than being considered a good thing, it creates a problem.

Third, you cannot finesse parking problems using enforcement means. The city should re-examine how it chooses to deal with the issue of long-term parking in the core downtown area. It should then think about how to incorporate and accommodate individuals who come to the downtown in order to do shopping or perhaps have a meal during the day.

A few weeks ago the suggestion was offered that perhaps the city needs a parking commission because the safety commission deals primarily with other issues. While it is not clear that a 20th city commission is needed, there does need to be at least a permanent subcommittee examining the issue of parking, parking enforcement, revenue, and parking allocation in both neighborhoods but also in the core downtown area.

The city in this realm seems to have been too smart for its own good. By investing in new technology the city managed to reduce its revenue flow, the irony of this situation should not be lost on its residents.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

The Future of Reparking in Davis

On August 14, 2006 the city implement strict rules against "reparking" based on a new city ordinance. The idea at the time was that by forcing cars to move to a different block every hour and a half to two hours, it would ease up some of the strain on the limited number on street parking spots in the downtown area. At the time, I thought it was a very Orwellian concept that would not work as planned, but nevertheless, they went forward with it.

Well now here we are in January, and apparently this is one of the topics under reconsideration. There are apparently two problems right now with the "reparking" program. The first problem is that instead of actually freeing up parking spots, you are just rotating cars around to the next block at various intervals. So you have the same amount of cars parking for the most part, they simply move from one block face to another. Rather than saving parking spots, it is probably creating more traffic problems.

The second problem came up during a budget item in November: the city is running short in revenue from parking fines. What has happened is with such a strict enforcement system with the new reparking prohibitions coupled with the GPS units (that really look Orwellian) on top of the parking enforcement vehicles, is that people have been complying with the law. Now that may seem like a good thing, but as we discovered in November, the city actually used to count on that revenue source in their budget. The stricter regulations have led to a decrease in a source of revenue for the city. Only perhaps in Davis is it a bad thing that people are being more diligent about following the law.

In short, it appears that the tougher restrictions have not met either the objective of cleaning up the parking problem of downtown streets and they have resulted in the unintended consequence of actually reducing city revenue collected in fines. On the other hand, they may have the drawback of discouraging people from having lengthy shopping visits to downtown by putting an artificial or psychological cap on the amount of the time they spend.

These factors would seem to be a strong incentive for the downtown businesses to find other solutions to the perpetual and growing problem of parking. Not to mention, we need to figure out a way to make people use the under utilized existing parking structures for their parking.

It is our opinion that the city of Davis ought to abandon the "reparking" prohibition in the downtown area and work towards encouraging people to utilize the parking structures and alternative forms of transportation into the downtown core. With the inevitable development of the new Target facility on the periphery, it is all the more imperative that these solutions be developed sooner rather than later so that we can preserve the character of our downtown and allow it to continue to thrive into the future.

---Doug Paul Davis reporting

City Running Short on Parking Fines

There was an odd moment last night when Finance Director Paul Navazio was presenting an update on the budget, one of the areas that had a shortfall was in public safety. It turned out they were running a deficit on parking fine and vehicle infractions. And we're not talking about chump change, it was in the tens of thousands if not higher.

Basically right now the city relies on the enforcement of parking violations as a steady source of revenue. What has happened however is that as they have gone to more and more strict systems of enforcement, the revenue has fallen off. With the implementation of the new GPS system and the no re-parking policy, the number of parking citations that have been issued has apparently fallen, moreover the expense of the system has risen. And so there is now a budget shortfall because the number of violations fell short of projections.

You have a catch 22 system going--you have a system that relies on people breaking the law in order to finance it. That seems archaic at best. You want to people to commit fewer not more violations of the law and yet you have budgeted the revenue from parking violations. It is just an odd system.

It seemed that the council acknowledged that this system is problematic at best and that you should not be relying on the revenue from parking violations to make your budget, and so I would guess that in the future they will fix the system.

So this is an item more of bemusement than of true criticism, but you still have to say... only in Davis is a reduction of traffic and parking violations a bad thing. (Actually I'm pretty sure that other cities problem have similar problems).

---Doug Paul Davis reporting