The City Council on Tuesday, among other things, took up the quarterly adjustment to fees throughout the city.
On this topic, have you ever wondered why parking citations are in even dollar amounts, like $40, $44, or $46? The answer is also the answer to another question: How does the State “force” the City to impose an extra $0.50 on parking tickets?
The answer: because the Department of Motor Vehicles does not make change.
Here’s the explanation.
The California legislature passed a bill that imposed a $1.50 charge for new State courthouse construction. The fee is tacked onto certain parking penalties, fines and forfeitures statewide, many of which are collected via the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the DMV does not keep any change in their cash registers. So, when you go to pay said parking penalties, fines or fees at the DMV, they have no way to collect that final $0.50 in cash. Because of this, according to City Hall, “the City can only charge even dollar amounts for its citations to comply with this State law.”
So, because the state passed a $1.50 increase, City Council on Tuesday approved a $2.00 increase to these parking penalties, fines or fees. The state will get their $1.50 and City Hall gets to keep the extra $0.50. After City Hall uses the extra cash to pay a certain amount to the state because the bill was retroactive, the extra $0.50 goes to the General Fund, in perpetuity.
The City issues about 400,000 parking citations a year, which means that the total annual take on the deal for the General Fund coffers (after paying back the retroactive amount) will be about $200,000.
Without raising the idea of how ridiculous it is that the DMV can’t carry coinage like every other business in the world, let’s move on to the crux of the issue.
Currently, $9.50 of each parking citation issued by the City goes to State and/or County courthouse construction programs. The first $5 goes to two Los Angeles County construction programs and the remaining $4.50 goes to two State construction programs.
Mr. Calculator tells us that if we multiply the 400,000 parking citation issued in by the City each year by the amounts going to the various court construction funds, Los Angeles County is getting $2 million a year from Long Beach and the state is getting $1.8 million a year.
The irony here, or perhaps irony is not even the right word, is that the Long Beach Superior Court on Ocean Boulevard is probably in worse condition than any other Los Angeles County courthouse.
On any given day toilets on various floors of the Long Beach Courthouse literally back up into the halls. Riding the escalators, those that are working that is, can be like a trip through the Amityville Horror house, as strange sludgy material drips down the walls. There have been instances where cases involving handicapped defendants have been postponed simply because the defendants could not be taken to the upper floors due to faulty elevators. In addition, following the Northridge earthquake, the two wings of the building shifted to such an extent that you can actually look down the gap between the different floors while crossing from the older section to the newer.
The main issue here is, if we (and I am talking about the 99.99 percent of us in Long Beach that have received a parking ticket at one time or another) are being forced to pay for courthouse construction, where in the heck is $2 million a year going? Or the additional $1.8 million going to the state.
Certainly, given the condition of the Long Beach Courthouse, Long Beach dollars are not staying here.
Some of the other 120 other fees approved by the City Council on Tuesday include increases to charitable solicitation permits (now $40), rummage sale permits (now $15), basic tow rates for light vehicles (now $144), $20 increases to various building transfers and liens, and a new fee for a wheel clamp pilot program for vehicle violation scofflaws. Once the program gets under way it will cost $110 to have the wheel lock removed from your vehicle.
Hopefully you won’t have to go down to the courthouse to pay it.