PD Editorial: Cracking down on handicapped parking cheats

Kudos to the Santa Rosa City Council for taking a no-more-nonsense approach to dealing with people who illegally use handicapped parking privileges. The abuse of those familiar blue placards should have everyone seeing red.

Parking enforcement officials say more able-bodied drivers are using the placards - whether they're forged, expired or belong to someone else - than ever before.

Why? One reason is there are more legal placards out there than ever before. The number issued in Sonoma County by the state Department of Motor Vehicles has increased 165 percent since 1994 to 32,000.

Some scofflaws use them to steal the closest parking spots in shopping areas, leaving those with the real mobility problems to park farther away. Many also use them at the curb, where they're stealing money as well as space. Under California law, cars displaying a disabled placard are allowed to park for free at metered spots for an unlimited time.

In response, Santa Rosa's parking supervisor Toni Guanella recommended in January that the City Council raise the fine for abusing handicapped parking privileges from $250 to $750.

Good idea, the council said, but that's not high enough.

So on Tuesday, the council voted to make the penalty $1,000, the highest amount allowed under a law passed in 2009 and signed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that gives cities more power to crack down on offenders. The council also amended the city's rules giving parking enforcement officers authorization to issue a citation for the abuse of disabled parking privileges. Previously, they were only allowed to cite for a meter violation.

We have some sympathy for those who feel that the fines and fees related to traffic enforcement have gotten out of hand. In a Sunday story about Sonoma County traffic court, Staff Writer Paul Payne wrote about a Rohnert Park woman who received a $480 ticket for pulling over to the wrong side of the road when she heard emergency vehicles approaching. Given that the recently unemployed woman was trying to do the right thing, the traffic commissioner took pity and knocked her fine down by $140.

Fair enough.

But we have no sympathy for those who abuse handicapped parking privileges, an act that requires a certain amount of premeditation if not malice.

And the situation is getting worse. In the past six months alone, Santa Rosa parking enforcement officers have confiscated at least 35 placards.

Part of the problem is that about one in 10 drivers in the state now has a valid disabled placard. But the state Department of Motor Vehicles has no way of tracking when one of these permanent holders dies. The system the DMV uses automatically renews the placards, sending them to the last known address. Motor vehicles officials also have no way of tracking or investigating physicians who authorize an unusually high number of placards.

As a result, officials with the DMV have estimated that at any given moment, as many as one out of three vehicles displaying the placards on the streets in California is doing so illegally.

The new rules established by the city of Santa Rosa will go far in cracking down on this kind of abuse. But traffic monitors say most of the citations come not as a result of their patrols from from calls from people who are upset at seeing people taking advantage of the system.

Nothing is likely to curb the enthusiasm of placard phonies more than being caught in the act - and being nailed with a four-digit fine.