BANGOR, Maine — For years, city officials have been chasing downtown parking rogues with minimal success. It’s a game of sorts, but one that parking enforcers lose often, like the Harlem Globetrotters continually beating up on the Washington Generals.
Every so often, Bangor city councilors debate the issue and try to come up with new ways to address repeat parking offenders. Sometimes, changes are made, but the problem seems to persist.
“It never goes away and probably never will,” Bangor Police Chief Ron Gastia said. “I think it’s one of those things that people are always concerned about, but there are no great answers or solutions. Unless we find millions of dollars to build garages in the middle of downtown, it will continue to come up.”
At a meeting this week, councilors discussed two more ways to target downtown parking scofflaws: create a tiered system that would increase the fines for repeat offenders and increase the fine to have a parking boot taken off a vehicle. After lengthy discussion, both items were tabled, but the city plans to continue looking more closely at the issue in the coming months.
Councilor Geoff Gratwick, who has served as the council’s liaison on the Downtown Parking Advisory Committee, agreed with Gastia’s assessment that the problem has no easy solution. Parking attendants write plenty of tickets, but it hasn’t seemed to matter.
“There are an enormous number of scofflaws that are playing the numbers game, and these people are primarily employees of downtown businesses,” Gratwick explained.
If a parking ticket costs $15 and a monthly parking permit costs $50, a motorist could get 39 parking tickets annually and still pay less.
A total of 50 motorists had more than 10 outstanding parking tickets each as of June 16, Gastia said, ranging from 10 to a high of 28. The number of motorists who have between six and nine outstanding tickets is in the hundreds, the chief said. Assuming $10 to $15 per ticket, Bangor is missing out on $20,000 to $30,000 in revenue, which is used to help subsidize the Police Department’s parking division.
Gastia said Thursday he did not have immediate access to the identity of the repeat offenders, but he stressed that his department tracks only license plates, not drivers.
To be eligible for a boot, which renders a vehicle immobile, a motorist has to have only three outstanding tickets, one of which is at least 30 days past due. The number of such offenders, according to Gastia, now stands at 1,252.
The current charge to have a boot removed is $25, but councilors are considering an increase to $100. Gastia said the boot is not used as often as it could be, mainly because of the staff time associated with the practice.
Councilor Cary Weston, who co-owns a downtown marketing and public relations business, said parking is one of his top three issues and, in a lot of ways, the city is enabling repeat offenders by not having stiffer penalties.
“We penalize repeat offenders in every other point of society,” he said. “There are business owners that recognize the value of the downtown spaces, but there are plenty of finance professionals, lawyers and others that are not as concerned about that.”
Elizabeth Sutherland, Weston’s business partner, said her company’s 10 employees park off-street in spaces provided by their landlord or in an off-street lot.
“I don’t necessarily know whose car is whose on the streets, but I see a lot of the same cars over and over again,” she said. “But these kinds of parking issues are in every community.”
Brad Ryder, who owns Epic Sports on Central Street, said he, too, sees the same cars every day and would happily support a tiered ticketing system.
“I feel like that would put some teeth into the problem,” he said. “Even $15 doesn’t faze people. It’s convenience over penalty.”
A tiered system would increase the fine after a certain number of tickets. For instance, the first ticket might be $15, but the second and third would jump to $25 and so on.
Although there was support for such a system among councilors this week, they agreed to wait to see if recent changes — increasing fines from $12 to $15 and changing some spaces from a 60-minute limit to a 90-minute limit — have any effect.
“I think before we implement or consider a tiered fee structure, we need to see if the fine increases have created a deterrent,” Gastia said. “Historically, tickets have not been a deterrent, but we need more time to study the changes.”
Ryder said the new 90-minute limit has made the problem worse.
“It has just allowed the shufflers another 30 minutes to move their car,” he said.
Another problem, Gratwick said, is the city’s antiquated system for tagging scofflaws. Instead of a handheld computer, parking enforcers carry a cumbersome list of repeat offenders that they can refer to. Gratwick and Weston support the idea of handheld computers for parking attendants.
“We know automation pays us back, but we have to pay now and that’s something the city hasn’t been willing to invest in,” Weston said.
A big issue for Gastia is collecting parking fines. The names of nearly 1,200 vehicle owners have been sent to collections agencies for unpaid fines, reflecting both a revenue problem for the city and a resource drain to track down these scofflaws, he said.
Parke Clemons of Republic Parking, the private firm that manages the city’s downtown parking lots and garages, said lack of off-street parking is not an issue. He oversees nearly 1,200 spaces in 13 lots, but people usually bypass that option.
“It seems to come down to a matter of convenience,” he said. “We’ve offered discount parking and shuttles, but incentives don’t always work.”
Sutherland said, as much as it’s a problem, the parking shuffle is not against the law.
“I’d like to see more incentives than disincentives,” she said. “But if we foster a willingness to look the other way, that’s not helping.”
In some ways, it comes down to changing perceptions, Gratwick said, and that’s not easy.
“There is plenty of off-street parking; that’s not the issue. If you were to go to the mall, you would likely walk further from a parking space to a store than you would from a garage to a store downtown. It’s a perception thing.”
Gratwick paused for a minute, then added: “I want to park directly in front of Bagel Central too, so maybe that’s human nature.”
Ryder, who has been a downtown business owner for 13 years, said the problem has not grown any better or worse in that time.
“If there were an easy solution, we would have found it a long time ago,” he said.