Target Is 90 a Day

Camille C. Barnett (File Photo)

That fact -- long denied by the people who oversee the city's parking enforcement -- came to light yesterday when D.C. Chief Management Officer Camille C. Barnett met with parking bureau officials and challenged them to come up with a fairer system.

She was told that the writers, who produced 2.1 million tickets last year, worth $49 million, are expected to write 90 tickets during the six hours each day they spend on patrol, although no one could tell her when the standard was established or precisely why the number 90 was picked.

That news did not sit well with Barnett, who has heard numerous complaints about over-zealous ticket writers.

"Your job is the fair regulation of parking," Barnett told the parking officials. "It is not giving tickets."

Barnett -- who has been swamped with complaints about ticket writing since she came to the job five months ago -- allowed a Washington Post reporter to sit in on the hour-long, closed-door meeting.

Few things in Washington anger people more than getting parking tickets they deem unfair. For years, critics have alleged that there must be a quota that drives overly aggressive ticket writing, even as District officials have denied that any strict standard exists.

Under Barnett's questioning yesterday, they acknowledged the 90-ticket-a-day goal.

"I'd like for you to do something about it," Barnett told parking enforcement officers, along with Public Works chief Cellerino C. Bernardino and parking enforcement director Norma Mapp. "You can be a model not only for being the most efficient part of the government, but the part perceived to be the most fair."

Rather than dictating specific changes, Barnett challenged more than a dozen front-line parking workers seated around her yesterday to work with their supervisors to devise a new system of regulation and enforcement that allows parking officers to exercise more judgment.

The 90-ticket standard can be difficult for some officers to meet since it applies citywide, without regard for the amount of traffic, available parking or congestion in a given area. Officers typically patrol the streets for six hours a day but sometimes must spend two or three hours defending their actions in court, increasing the pressure on them to write tickets even faster the next day.

At 14th and K streets NW yesterday, angry plumbing and electrical workers building D.C. Coast, a new seafood restaurant, decried the $50 tickets they receive routinely for parking at meters longer than two hours.

It is ludicrous, they said, for workers who often need tools and material from their vehicles to receive thousands of dollars in parking tickets instead of special parking passes that could be distributed with construction permits.

"If we could do enough business without doing business in the District, we would do so," said James Holt, a consultant with Holt Electric, a family firm that has been rewiring buildings in the region since 1898. "We do business in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware and other cities like Baltimore, and we don't have the kind of animosity we have here. They're so damn aggressive here I've had tickets on my truck when it was parked at broken meters where the head was completely gone."

After being informed that Barnett was modifying the system to make it more fair, Holt and others on the job site praised the chief management officer.

"She's a nice lady, and she will get it done," said construction worker Leonard McDonald, a Southeast Washington resident who until recently worked for the city's Department of Motor Vehicles and issued Barnett her driver's license earlier this year. "She's got it."

Other cities also face tension over a lack of adequate parking, but officials say they don't endorse the use of specific performance targets because they can lead to overly zealous ticket writing. "The New York City police department does not have quotas," Lt. Stephen Biegel said. "There is no set number."

Bernardino said the city must have specific performance standards to ensure that parking regulations are enforced. He also said a study showed that even with the existing ticket-writing standards, 90 percent of parking violations in the city go unpunished.

"The real problem," Bernardino said, "is that there is not enough parking."

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

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