City doles out 2,297 street-sweep tickets

HUNTINGTON BEACH -- After returning from a holiday vacation last week,

resident James Gallagher found an unwelcome surprise from the city on the

windshields of his cars -- two parking tickets.

The city began issuing the tickets this month to enforce new parking

restrictions to allow additional street sweeping.

Gallagher wasn’t the only one caught. Between Jan. 3 and Friday, the city

issued 2,297 tickets to people who failed to move their cars, Deputy City

Administrator Rich Barnard said.

At $32 each, the money adds up quickly.

Gallagher, for one, doesn’t want to be “gouged” by the city, he said.

But City Councilwoman Shirley Dettloff said the benefits of clean streets

outweigh the cost of additional tickets.

“It’s not a money grab,” she said. “It’s just that everything comes with

a price tag.”

For about the last four years, the city swept the streets only once a

month. But now the sweepers roll by twice a month, allowing the city to

better control the problems of “standing water” and urban runoff, said

Don Noble, the city’s maintenance operations manager.

Considering the beach contamination the city suffered through during the

summer, no one needs to be reminded of the danger posed by urban runoff,

which includes chemicals, fertilizers and animal droppings found on lawns

and often washed onto the streets and into storm drains that flow into

the ocean, Noble said. Standing water is an issue because the city is

basically flat, he said. Water that remains stagnant attracts algae and

mosquitoes. It also endangers bikers and skaters who might slip and fall

on the slick surface, he said.

But what angers Gallagher most is that his street is kept clean, so even

if the sweepers have to go around parked cars, there’s no need for a

ticket, he said.

“They don’t use reason in enforcing [the new parking restrictions],” he

said.

But the city can’t efficiently run a program that has to evaluate

cleanliness on a street-by-street basis, Noble said. Besides, “clean

means different things to different people,” he said.

Residents had plenty of warnings before tickets were issued, Dettloff

said. More than 30,000 warnings were posted on illegally parked cars

during November and December, according to a city memo.

While there still may be a “difficult” transition period, Dettloff

expects people to fall in line eventually. That appears to be the case,

as the number of tickets issued dropped from day to day last week,

Barnard said.

If tickets keep coming, though, Gallagher suggested that residents may

lose their patience and look for a different solution to the parking

dilemma.

“It might get to the point of wanting to see new faces on the City

Council,” Gallagher said.