Letter: S. Tahoe begins fireworks with parking tickets
To the community,
I’m holding citation No. LT10000849, a parking ticket issued on June 29, 2013, in the Venice East paid parking area. The parking meters are up and ticking. Chaos has started in the good old summertime in America’s year-round playground. Have fun.
It appears that the ticket was thrown away by a motorist, no doubt an unhappy camper. The tariff for the violation is $55 mailed to a processing center in Newport Beach. An appeal can be sent to the center, online of course.
Bill Crawford
The latter operation is a divorce created by the city between citizens and city government. Bureaucracy at its best. Also, there is no signage informing the public that there is paid parking on Venice East. One vehicle had paid. Attached to the vehicle was a boat trailer. Apparently, the boat trailer was covered by the parking fee paid for the vehicle. So, the question is, can boat trailers be parked on Venice East? Also, the street isn’t stripped for paid parking. What about RVs?
The city in haste to pick the pocket of visitors and locals lives up to its knack for creating chaos and mistrust.
Bill Crawford, South Lake Tahoe
PS: On July 1, the city painted black paint over the parallel white lines on Venice East, lines that are there for the safety of walkers, joggers, and cyclists. The lines were “erased” to mark space for paid parking. Priorities do change.
Citizens would be better served if the city was dissolved now, along with its mismanagement, higher taxes, fees, fines, poor snow removal, and misplaced priorities.
Porked
that will be the new slogan for our town
“come to Tahoe get Porked”
The artist working on the Memorial Tree got one as we were unloading material and the tree with the crane for the replacement of the tree on June 25, 2013. #B30629 for $55.00. We now have to ask for more donations to cover the tickets.
Don’t forget about the additional admin fee the company in Newport Beach adds to the ticket and why is that money being spent outside our community?
Those aren’t parking tickets. They’re tickets out of town – “AND DON’T COME BACK!”
Maybe the City could bill other vacation areas for the business it’s sending them.
Your taxpayer dollars at work!
Embarrassing
DON”T FORGET TO USE YOUR “DISABLED PARKING PLACARD” AND PARD FOR FREE!
What I don’t understand is why the City always turns a blind eye to the sports enthusiasts who drive on the bike trail along Lyons Avenue at the Middle School ball fields to park on taxpayer paid re-vegetation. (Hey, “athletes,” its a short walk to the main parking lot in front of the school!) I’ve seen the cops drive by numerous times and they never do anything to stop this. Seems revenue trumps public safety in South Lake Tahoe. Maybe it will take a kid getting run over and a lawsuit against the City before any enforcement happens. Selective enforcement of the law is the first sign of tyranny.
Ken talk to the city manager. She should be able to fix it!
Mr. Crawford:
Perhaps you should once again go to the City Council and request that this time they place boulders on the street sides of Venice East. That would eliminate that pesky boat trailer and auto parking and would make paid parking on Venice East moot. This worked for you once before, maybe you can have that same success again.
I took an informal survey based on the speedometer on my 1996 ford F150 on Friday afternoon.
If the city installed speed cameras on the main drag on highway 50, they could generate 300 million dollars per year in speeding violations if they only charged 55 bucks for the fine. (same as the parking violation)
Of course they would have to pay some management fees to some company in Socal or New Jersey for administering the program but what the hell. The capital costs, properly negotiated, would be borne by the administrator.
Cut the police department to about 10 guys/gals and cash the checks.
I hope to see this on the City Council agenda soon!
Observer:
Be careful what you wish for. My brother-in-law who now lives in Oregon was mailed a citation from Redwood City, San Carlos or Belmont on the SF Peninsula for failure to stop at a red light on a right turn where they got him on camera. They even furnished him with several photos of his vehicle, his front license plate, and a rather nice candid close up of his face. The photos had clock ticker stuff and everything. Never even knew any of it happened until it showed up in the mail along with the envelope where to mail the fine.
I call that a real revenue generator.
deal with it.. f the tahoe keys anyways..
I have never seen parking signs face the middle of the street (Venice East). Very confusing signage, no marked spots or numbers. I am sure city folks know the deal.
YALL STILL KEEPING VOTING FOR THE SAME FOOLS THAT SOMEHOWCONTROLJOHNSGANG!!
If the City is gonna rape the public to park there – they should at least clean up all the dog crap daily …….
Just another example of local agencies “taking” for profit
I guess I was not outrageous enough for folks to see the sarcasm that this is exactly what these fools running the city might do.
Oh, the City has basically hidden the fact that there’s now paid parking on Venice. They’re clearly looking to stick it to people with parking tickets! You can’t see the kiosks, but boy is the parking police sure regularly going up and down that street trying to generate some revenue!
And if anyone goes down to the Lakeside area, they’ll see the this scam is clearly hurting the tourist (you know, who keeps our town’s lights on) experience!
This so called program is turning out to be even worse than I imagined it would be!
The city’s paid parking plan is half baked. The signage is confusing, the meters don’t take folding money (just quarters and credit cards),spaces were not marked when the plan started ( I noticed today July 3rd, five days after paid parking went into effect on Paradise Ave. that the street was closed and being stripped). After telling us that Lakeside Park needed to have meters because TRPA would not allow parking on dirt you install kiosks on the three streets around the boat trailer parking at El Dorado Beach that, by the way, are all dirt areas. City, get your act together. You look like fools. Where do you expect all the local employees that use Paradise Ave. to park? When the Ski Run Marina was developed, parking was know to be inadequate for the center.Off site alternatives were sought, but never fully developed or realized. Paradise Ave became the defacto parking alternative. Now you want to charge employees to park there. This is sooo short sighted. I drove down Venice Drive on Sunday and noted that half the cars had $55.00 tickets wedged into the driver side windows. I just don’t see the up side to any of this. 87% of the people that responded to the Tribune poll were against the paid parking meters.
The city should take a large step back and rethink this pathetic plan that was sold as a means to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to preserve two police jobs.
The significant key that everyone seems to be missing is that the revenue is being collected by a private “entrepreneur” in Newport Beach. Which, no doubt, has a contract with the city to return a percentage of what it collects.
The commercializing of routine law enforcement issues has become epidemic: red light cameras, speed cameras, commuter lane enforcement, toll ways built at taxpayers expense but returning enforcement revenue to the political entities etc. and so on. Every scam I’ve listed has become hugely popular in some part of our country or another – including “California South.” In absolutely every instance there are documented accounts of parameters and standards being manipulated by the contractor to guarantee maximum revenues, regardless of any concerns for justice and citizen safety. And the contractor so thoroughly filters the process that most folks wanting to protest their latest exposure to the “criminal justice” system give up in frustration.
I hope I’m not exposing something prematurely, but Kae could perform a real journalistic service to the citizens by finding the firm in Newport Beach that is profiting from local tourists and determine exactly how their business works and how they wound up contracted to the City. Anyone want to bet against the notion that they made the first proposal?
(And, by the way Bill, I was at the Lake today; drove by our old neighborhood where I used to start my runs and wave to you as I went by. The trees have matured and the area is looking more and more like a mountain town – even to the point of its crumbling streets and its deteriorating infrastructure. And parking meters – who would have believed it?)
Its time the Tahoe Keys HOA becomes a CSD and controls all its own services. Just imagine the loss of tax revenue the City would realize. All you keys haters out there, they subsidize a large majority of this town with their high tax rates.
The solution is easy. A small hand held sledge hammer. .
dryclean:
Are you really advocating destruction of public property? Over parking meters?
I think that some of the posters to this thread have created a much more serious problem over parking meters than something of this importance warrants. Geez, it’s not like you just got diagnosed with cancer and someone told you “but you don’t get to have any treatment”. If you don’t like the parking meters then don’t park there and park somewhere else. Save your precious energy for the really important things in life.
When I see it, firsthand, impact the lifeblood of our economy, the tourists, who instead of enjoying their Tahoe experience are trying to figure out this stupid system, it’s a big deal!!
If the lifeblood of our economy is dependent on people who are incapable of figuring out how to pay for parking, then this town is in bigger trouble than anyone ever imagined. I personally don’t think that the majority of tourists who visit SLT are that unintelligent.
And worrying about how much time they have AND getting nailed with tickets! (Which as I said about Venice, the lack of visibility with the kiosks and parking lines, tickets are clearly the City’s goal!)
I’ve said before, will it stop people from coming to Tahoe, of course not.
But the more fun people have, the more they spend! If they have less fun, then there’s less money flowing into our business’ coffers. It’s a concept bureaucrats just can’t, or refuse, to understand!
I’ll bet the guy who tossed the ticket that Crawford found won’t be back – particularly after he gets the bill for non-payment of the $55 fine. If I were staying in a vacation resort area, paying for an overpriced dumpy motel room, eating in crowded mid-range quality restaurants at gourmet prices, putting up with surly business owners and innkeepers and fighting traffic everywhere I went, I’d probably toss the ticket as well. I’d wonder where these locals think they are, the flippin’ Caribbean?
copper:
Wow! Those are some really hateful comments about pretty much all of SLT. Since it would make no sense for someone to choose to live in a place that evokes such an extreme degree of negative feelings I am left to believe that you must have visited here and had some really bad experiences. For that I am sorry and hope that wherever you choose to visit in the future will better meet your expectations and provide something of a much more positive nature. The best of luck to you in the future.
What is the return to the city from Newport Beach on a $55.00 parking ticket?
Parking down at Lakeside Beach is ridiculous too. We had a physically disabled person in our car, and were still made to pay the $20 to park. Sad thing is that half of the vehicles didn’t have parking stickers (from paying at the kiosk) and I never saw ONE parking violation ticket!
And the kiosks were very confusing even with the nice little instructions taped to the side (which were removed by someone halfway through the day). It said to pay $10 two times making the total $20. But if you push the “max” button it automatically went to a total of $20. So naturally most people pushed the “max” button, and when the kiosk told them that their credit card was denied they were very confused. I talked to a lot of people at the beach who had the same issues. Some just decided that the kiosks weren’t working correctly and gave up, others finally figured out how to do the two $10 purchases and got their parking passes printed out.
Oh, and that nice newport beach company doesn’t even reply to an appeal! I got a ticket from them last year and appealed it (with photo evidence) and the only response I got was a denial. What a great company… NOT! Handle it locally so there is local accountability please.
Could someone who’s gotten a ticket, or otherwise has this information, share with us the name and address of the Newport Beach company that’s handling these citations?
On edit: Looks like it might be dataticket.com which advertises that it “maximizes revenue for its clients,” in case anyone imagines that there is some public service or safety purpose to this exercise in law enforcement.
There is an illegal auto body shop operating at 3734 Birch St in S. Lake. These gentleman are painting 2 to 3 cars a week right on the street, and polluting a whole neighborhood with extremely toxic products. As well as running an illegal hair saloon. I called the S. Tahoe Police, Community Service officer, AND El Dorado Environmental Health Dept. more than 3 weeks ago. They could care less!!! Maybe they could come and ticket the 10 to 15 cars they ALWAYS have parked on the street!!
I got one and here is the contact info
Citation Processing Center
1-800-989-2058
PO Box 10479
Newport Beach, CA 92658-0479
My parking ticket was issued on D St inside of a construction zone I was working on. I was standing 50 feet away from my truck which was parked with the vehicles hazard lights on. The officer wrote the ticket and left, nearly driving over our traffic cones to stop to write me the ticket. I contested the citation with pictures and a written statement, including the permit number for the project. The response said that it was not a valid reason. I am now requesting an in-person hearing to see if this was just a computer generated response to contesting the citation.
That is the same Newport Beach address I got last year as well, although in my case it was warranted (my son parked the wrong way, facing traffic, on San Jose Ave.) I also found it ridiculous the processing would be contracted elsewhere instead of hiring a local data entry person.
Everyone should write the City Council and let them know what a mistake they made.
And tahoeadvocate, if that doesn’t work, let’s see if we can get an inititiative on the ballot to overturn this Newport Beach-enriching plan!
Citation Processing Center seems to be the collection arm of Data Ticket, 4600 Campus Rd, Suite 200, Newport Beach, Ca.
This is a link to an article about the operation from the Orange County Weekly. It’s a bit old, and perhaps there have been some changes, although they don’t seem to be documented on the internet. But the article is interesting, not only for its critical insight into the workings of Data Ticket, but also for the documentation of the changes in California law that have enabled businesses like Data Ticket to take what once was a parking enforcement issue and turn it into a cash cow for cities. Very likely the motivation for the way South Lake Tahoe now deals with its visitors – as well as its residents.
http://www.ocweekly.com/2007-03-22/news/ticket-wizard-revisited/
tahoeadvocate and Parker:
I think your ideas of writing to the City Council and letting them know that you believe they made a mistake and of placing an initiative on the ballot to overturn this plan are the two best suggestions I’ve read on this thread. Congratulations on coming up with action plans to address something that you don’t agree with and don’t like.
While people can commiserate their shared dislike of something on a blog that unfortunately won’t effectuate real change which requires taking an action. If our Founding Fathers had only blogged via penned editorials and taken no other action we likely wouldn’t be the United States of America.
Parker and tahoeadvocate, I look forward to learning more about your action plans.
No need for the council to waste any more dollars on yet another consultant on this one because it obviously stinks. In their haste to gouge our guests, visitors and locals, it seemed that the actual means to implement this “plan” was over looked and poorly thought out. Even though the city of Truckee has stated that if they had a do-over they would not have installed a paid parking program, our leaders decided to go ahead. Let’s face it: This program is a gigantic fail. The money could have been used to fix a few potholes…
We could have bought a new snowplow and drivers instead of kiosks and ticket writers. Hopefully used kiosks have some value but I doubt it.
The city council has repeatedly proceeded with get-rich-quick schemes that don’t work, regardless of what results have been in other places. Convention centers had been shown to be money-losers years before the Hole in the Ground ever even started buying up properties. Studies had been done. Truckee has shown that parking meters are more trouble and expense than they’re worth. But our little city fathers/mothers don’t pay attention.
Guess they think they’re smarter than others?
Yesterday July 10th at 2:00 pm 7 cars on the aprox 1/2 mile of paid parking on venice east. At 5:00 pm 5 cars. Are we making money yet? Please take notice when you are out to how many people are parking in the pay spots. Also tonight is the first time to pay for parking at lakeview concert. News last night, Reno’s paid parking a disaster and thats a real city with lots of people and no snow.
I’m pretty sure a large part of the revenue is expected to be from the citations. If so (or even if not), the biggest problem with only 5 or 7 cars is that it’s easier to spot the kiosks so the guy who parks his car under the sign, looks around without seeing a kiosk and walks away will now at least see where to pay. Anyone want to venture an opinion on whether the Orange County company responsible for all this also recommended the style (small, darkly painted, poorly marked) and the separation distance for the kiosks?
Southern California is famous for this kind of stuff (among other things). The expansion of the 91 Freeway was held up for years by the private builder of a toll road bypass because his contract with Riverside County prevented any highway expansion that might reduce traffic jams and so reduce incentive to pay to use his toll road. And red light camera contracts prevent cities from altering the time of the yellow so that violations might be reduced (traffic engineers can predict the number of red light runners by the length of the yellow). Whenever you hear of public enterprise taking over a government function, look first for the scam.
Maybe SLT should change its name to Whoreville. Parking meters, short term rentals in residential neighborhoods, holes in the ground and now the loop road project. There really seems to be no organized consensus here. Just shots in the dark similar to a drug addicted prostitute.
Hey Bob, you’re giving prostitutes a bad rap!
As a former SLT resident, there was no sadder day than the one when I loaded up the moving van and went off the hill.
Why did I leave? Poor job prospects within a 150 mile radius (I’d have stayed even walking uphill both ways during blizzards if there were jobs!). Terribly unpredictable snow removal, so that the little work I could get was sometimes impossible to get to. A horribly unresponsive out of touch city council that can’t even figure out how to fill a gaping hole after five years of arguing about it. What will it take? A bull dozer and some dirt!! What kind of revenue is it generating sitting there fenced off?!?! Make it a free parking lot, show some good will toward residents and tourists alike. But instead, the city makes a deal with the devil where parking “kiosks” are so well hidden Kreskin can’t even find them with his third eye?
I used to love the fact that Lake Tahoe was so accessible. And heck, it wasn’t even that accessible, or free. I just learned all the places to get near it where there was free parking. Now, I’m afraid to even drive THROUGH that town because of the revenue generating DUI “checkpoints” to find just cause for any and all moneymaking infractions and the huge parking fees. Don’t worry about running off the tourists, SLT you should be worrying about running off the residents. Without your ‘service job’ employee base, there won’t be a town left to speak of. All that will remain are out-of-town parking enforcement companies. Theres only one or two ways in and out of town, and people who have had “The Tahoe Experience” have found themselves much like fish in a barrel. Getting in and out without getting a ticket, should be an olympic sport.
PLEASE dissolve the city…that is exactly what we were thinking with the idea of the loop road, parking meters, one-way streets…It should have never been formed. Every else around the lake operates just fine without forming a city, it is now to our detriment that it was formed.
Hey Scout, you know how to get through town without getting a ticket? Ride a bike!
You can blow through every stop sign and light, ride on the wrong side of the road, drink a beer, flip your cigarette ends on the street, pretty much anything you want and you’ll NEVER get cited!