RIPPING OFF THE TAXPAYERS : RESIDENTS-ONLY PARKING PROGRAMS TURN PUBLIC STREETS INTO PRIVATE DOMAIN.

Byline: Steve Gofman

IN my former hometown, the residents of one neighborhood would fill otherwise empty street-parking spaces with chairs, buckets and old tires as a not-so-subtle way of saying, ``Don't even think of parking here.''

That created a big headache for me, and others like me, who drove to the neighborhood to eat in one of the many restaurants there. What, I thought, gives these people the right to claim city streets, which my tax dollars maintain, as their own?

What if, however, the neighborhood residents, instead of placing chairs and old tires in the street, went to the city council and asked that the city adopt an ordinance creating a residents-only parking zone that prohibits me from parking on the same street? Would that make the end result any more palatable?

That is exactly what is happening in my former hometown, in Los Angeles and in other cities and towns all across America where there are fewer street-parking spaces than people who want to use them.

Here in Los Angeles, there are 64 resident-only parking districts, each covering about 10 city blocks. Only a person who lives in the district can get a permit, which costs $15 per year - not a bad price when you consider that private parking spaces in some of those same neighborhoods can cost hundreds of dollars a month.

Sound unfair? Think twice before you run to court complaining that residents-only parking violates your constitutional rights. Twenty years ago the U.S. Supreme Court said that a city could impose such restrictions without violating the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, as long as there is a legitimate purpose for the restriction and the restriction bears a rational relationship to that purpose.

Legitimate purposes, according to the Supreme Court, include enhancement of the ``quality of life'' - and thus property values - for residents through reduction of pollution, noise, traffic hazards and litter. The theory is that making it easy for residents to leave their cars at home - while preventing you, the nonresident, from parking where you work, shop or eat - will encourage everyone to use mass transit or car pools, thus reducing pollution and noise.

Despite the specter of the Supreme Court's decision 20 years ago, aggrieved nonresidents in Los Angeles County have filed numerous lawsuits attempting to overturn residents-only parking programs, including one brought recently by a Beverly Hills commercial building owner whose tenants' businesses were suffering because of a residents-only parking program. These lawsuits have met with little success.

Is it possible that there is more going on here than the desire for clean air, though? Is it possible that the real goal of such parking programs is not to clean the environment but simply to give residents an advantage they otherwise would not have?

Is it possible that the politicians who approve such programs do so because they know residents, not nonresidents, keep them in office?

Many, perhaps a majority, of residents-only parking programs are initiated at the urging of residents upset that they can't find parking convenient to their houses or apartments. That's an understandable gripe, but it's also part of city living. Common sense says that, when a person chooses to live on a street with scarce on-street parking and at the same time chooses not to live in a house or apartment with private off-street parking or to pay for a private parking space, the person has chosen to live with the consequences.

Critics of residents-only parking have questioned the true motives behind the programs. Those true motives become clear when one looks at comments of residents who have petitioned for residents-only parking programs, comments that rarely mention anything other than their own problems finding convenient parking spaces. A Secaucus, N.J., resident was quoted as saying of that town's program, ``You got it so you can park anyplace in town, and that's the way it should be if you are a resident.''

And a resident of Albany, N.Y., stated in a newspaper editorial that a residents-only program would give residents a ``respite from the almost complete inability to use our automobiles during the business day,'' apparently forgetting that the purpose of residents-only parking programs is, supposedly, to encourage residents to leave their cars at home during the day.

One might also question why, if the converse purpose is to discourage nonresidents from using their cars, so many of the residents-only parking programs allow residents to give temporary permits to their nonresident guests.

What these local residents are forgetting is that the streets, including the parking spaces, are public property and are maintained, repaired and cleaned with public tax dollars.

That was the point made recently by a California appellate court faced with a different but related type of case, one involving residents of a Hollywood Hills neighborhood who constructed a gate barring nonresidents from entering, even though the city of Los Angeles maintained the streets within the neighborhood.

The court, in ordering the gate torn down, said it could not allow local residents to turn public streets into miniature fiefdoms.

Like gated communities, residents-only parking programs are another step toward a return to the walled cities of old, with residents in the role of landed gentry, free to travel wherever they please and to keep others out of their fiefdom, and nonresidents in the role of peasants, forbidden from entering the domain of the landed gentry, unless given permission - or, in this case, a guest-parking permit.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

PHOTO Those with residents-only parking privileges on public streets avoid feeding coins into a meter, but this creates problems for other motorists.

Jeff Goldwater/Daily News