Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing to mount cameras on the District’s fleet of street sweepers in an intensified effort to nab vehicles illegally parked during a block’s designated weekly cleaning period.
D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray has introduced legislation at Fenty’s request to add parking enforcement to the city’s arsenal of automated-ticketing technologies. Like photo red-light and radar technology, the cameras would photograph the license plate of an offender’s illegally parked vehicle, noting the date and time. A computer program would then automatically issue the ticket.
Fenty’s intent is to use the cameras solely to increase enforcement in street-sweeping zones without spreading thin the District’s 200 parking enforcers and “without having to add full-time employees,” said Dena Iverson, mayoral spokeswoman. But there is nothing in the legislation limiting them to that purpose.
“I wouldn’t view it as a parking-enforcement mechanism,” Ward 1 D.C. Council Member Jim Graham, who has oversight of public works, said of the use of cameras. “It’s something that helps us clean the streets. People need to get the message that if we want clean streets you’ve got to move your cars. And I don’t know how else to do this.”
John Townsend, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, said using cameras for parking violations is “strictly about revenue enhancement” and serves no public-safety purpose.
“It’s a robotic meter maid and I think motorists would have great reservations about that and so would AAA,” Townsend said. “Just write the people a ticket.”
The city’s parking-enforcement officers issue about 800 street-cleaning violations per day during the sweeping season at $30 per ticket.
Although he acknowledged the legislation would allow parking-enforcement cameras to be used almost anywhere in the city, Graham said he would “make sure it’s limited to street cleaning.”
The issue of parking cameras first cropped up in Fenty’s 100 Days and Beyond action plan. City Administrator Dan Tangherlini told The Examiner earlier this year it is not in the city’s “interest to put a traffic camera onto each D.C. government employee.”
