In Illinois What to do about parking scofflaws

Part of an on going article by;
Chicago Sun-Times
By MARK BROWN ; Nov 21, 2011

It’s been six years since Bill Bogdan took me fishing, and while it wasn’t quite as much fun as when I went with Sun-Times’ outdoor writer Dale Bowman, it had its moments.

The difference was that while Bowman and I were angling for lake perch, Bogdan took me in search of a species of bottom-feeding scum-suckers that made the occasional goby Bowman and I reeled ashore look like trophy lake trout by comparison.

I speak of disabled parking scofflaws, those incredibly loathsome individuals who pretend to have a disability to get an advantage on parking their car.

When Bogdan, the disability liaison for the Illinois Secretary of State, took me trolling through the parking lots of suburban parking malls in 2005, disabled parking scofflaws already were on the increase.

Even then, one big reason was clear — the rising cost of parking in the city of Chicago. That’s because individuals with state-issued disability placards are exempt by state law from paying parking meters.

That was three years before former Mayor Richard M. Daley cashed out the city’s future parking meter revenue by leasing the meters to a private company in a deal that sent parking meter rates soaring higher.

Suddenly the incentive to cheat was that much greater, and as a Watchdogs report last week by the Sun-Times’ Chris Fusco showed, that’s exactly what’s happening.



It only makes sense that in a world where able-bodied people don’t think twice about using their late mom’s parking placard to get a space at the mall that they certainly won’t have any pangs of conscience when it will save them $25 a day on downtown parking.

The question now is what to do about it.

Back in 2005, Bogdan was optimistic that newly increased fines for fraudulent use of disabled placards would convince local governments to crack down on abuse.

Naturally, that’s been the suggestion again this time. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has already introduced an ordinance calling for higher fines and even towing for someone caught in the act by a police officer. Secretary of State Jesse White is also looking at higher fines and possibly drivers license suspensions.

The track record indicates to me that you can’t enforce your way out of the problems. Enforcement is labor intensive and time consuming. In a city emphasizing the need to put more police officers on the street, it makes no sense to assign those officers to surveillance duty of disabled parking scofflaws.

Instead, we should think outside the box, as state Rep. Karen May (D-Highland Park) did last week in saying she will introduce legislation to do away with free parking for all but a select group of people with disabilities — those whose disability truly prevents them from feeding the parking meter or who meet certain income guidelines.

Take away the financial incentive and the demand for disabled parking downtown will decrease dramatically — as Fusco points out took place in Philadelphia.

May’s proposal is a gutsy stand for a politician, none of whom want to be portrayed as insensitive to the disabled. But she believes, as do I, that the right to preferred parking and free parking are two different questions, and that doing away with the freebie should free up more parking spaces for disabled individuals who need them.

May, who is leaving the legislature at the end of this term, admits she might not have stepped out front on this emotional issue if she planned to stay in office.

“It makes you very free to do what’s right, and that’s a great feeling,” May told me.

Reaction has been mixed. May believes her past work on behalf of autistic children makes clear that she is an advocate for the disabled, though not everyone calling her office is convinced. “I think the first reaction is ‘she’s a scrooge,’ ” May said.

But May says it’s “crazy” to assume that because a person is disabled, they are too poor to pay for parking. Some of her critics have pointed out that under the city’s parking meter lease deal, it would be the parking concessionaire that would benefit from making more people pay, not the city.

That may be true, but this also could provide an opening for the city to reopen negotiations on the meter lease, as a certain mayoral candidate promised to do.

# http://www.suntimes.com/news/brown/8992354-452/what-to-do-about-parking-scofflaws.html