The BroadsheetDAILY ~ 1/10/20 ~ News of Lower Manhattan

In spite of a putative crackdown on placard parking abuse that was slated to begin Monday, dozens of illegally parked cars bearing law enforcement placards remained on River Terrace this week.

Amid much fanfare, multiple City agencies recently announced that, starting Monday, they would take part in a crackdown on illegal parking by government employees, whose personal vehicles bear placards that allow them to leave their cars blocking bus stops, crosswalks, fire hydrants, bike lanes, and lanes needed for use by fire trucks and ambulances.

By Tuesday, it appeared that dozens of law enforcement personnel who work in Battery Park City hadn’t heard, or perhaps knew better. That morning, the Broadsheet counted 28 vehicles parked illegally on River Terrace, between Chambers and Vesey Streets, all of them displaying placards identifying the cars as belonging to police officers from various agencies. (Several of these placards had been altered, with the license plate number on the placard crossed out and written over, to match the plates on the car.) All were parked on the west side of the River Terrace, which is marked “No Standing Anytime.” None of these 28 vehicles had been issued a summons by the omnipresent and aggressive parking enforcement officers who patrol Battery Park City at all hours of the day and night, quickly writing tickets to violators who do not display government credentials.

On Wednesday evening, at a meeting of the Battery Park City Committee of Community Board 1 (CB1), Betty Kay (who chairs CB1’s Transportation Committee) noted that the number of cars parked illegally on River Terrace had grown to 35.

Most of these vehicles appear to belong to officers assigned to the New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), an arm of the Drug Enforcement Administration that is headquartered at 250 Vesey Street, in Brookfield Place. Because this office, which brings together more than 100 officers from a dozen-plus City, State, and federal agencies, conducts sensitive, undercover investigations, it must conceal from public view the vehicles it uses for actual law enforcement operations. For this reason, OCDETF pays for 130 parking spaces in an underground garage within 250 Vesey Street.

The vehicles parked on River Terrace appear not to be used for any official purpose. Rather, they are used by officers driving between their homes and the OCDETF office at Brookfield Place. During a 2018 meeting with CB1 officials, convened to address illegal parking by law enforcement personnel in Battery Park City, a New York Police Department commander was blunt about this, telling CB1 members that the officers at OCDETF required many dozens of street parking spaces, “for commutation purposes.”

Last February, when the City Council began debating a package of legislation designed to curtail illegal parking by placard holders, Council Speaker Corey Johnson said, “placard abuse is corruption, plain and simple, and New York City cannot tolerate it any longer.”

The comparison between corruption and using placards (which are supposed to facilitate official business or operations by government personnel in an emergency) is striking. Many dozens of law enforcement personnel use placards to park each day throughout Battery Park City (and hundreds more do the same throughout Lower Manhattan) in spaces that are off limits to people not fortunate enough to have such credentials. And the monetary value of such a privilege is substantial. Daily parking in a local garage runs, on average, to more than $50. Extrapolated to five days per week, and 50 weeks per year (allowing two off for vacation), this comes to $12,500. But the person paying this amount would have to earn approximately $16,000 before taxes in order to cover such an expense.

Alternately, parking illegally requires an even-larger budget, because the City’s parking enforcement agents are authorized to write repeated tickets to a single vehicle for the same violation throughout the day. But assume, conservatively, that a vehicle parked illegally is ticketed just twice each day (for the same numbers of days described above), and that each summons carries a fine of $101: the average price of a parking ticket in Battery Park City, which is tied for the highest anywhere in the five boroughs, according to a 2017 study by SpotAngels (a smartphone app that offers users real-time data about available street parking options nearby). In this hypothetical, the cost of the privilege rises to $50,500 per year, or more than $65,000 before taxes.

In either scenario, hundreds of government employees appear to be helping themselves to an illegal gratuity worth tens of thousands of dollars per year each. In an era when a police officer would fear serious consequences for accepting a free sandwich from a sidewalk vendor, this raises sobering questions about integrity.

According to the SpotAngels study, the Financial District is the most hostile environment for parkers anywhere in the five boroughs, with an average of 25 tickets written for each parking space every year, and each space subsidizing City government with about $2,219 per year. (This is more than twice the average for Manhattan as a whole, where each parking space disgorges an average of $1,093 in annual revenue.) In FiDi, this amounts to 118,289 violations written every 12 months. With an average fine of $89.10 per ticket, these summonses contribute an annual $10,537,000 to municipal revenue.

In Tribeca, the outlook is only slightly less grim. In that neighborhood, every parking space is the location for 18 violations per year, ringing an additional $1,559 on the municipal cash register. This totals up to 71,215 annual tickets for the community as a whole, with an average price $87.60, yielding $6,236,236 in funds for the City.

And if parking in Lower Manhattan is generally difficult, within Battery Park City, it borders on the impossible. The neighborhood is, in statistical terms, the most parking-deprived community in the five boroughs of New York City. With a residential population of more than 13,000 (and another 10,000 reporting here for work each day), it has just 201 parking spaces available to the public, of which 58 are metered and 143 are unregulated, except by alternate-side parking rules. (These figures come from a City Department of Transportation study, issued in 2008, the last year for which detailed numbers are available.) While there is ample curb space within the community’s 92 acres (enough for more than 1,600 parking spaces), 59 percent of it falls within zones that are signed “no standing” (785 spaces) and “no parking” (581 spaces). Much of the rest is set aside for commercial vehicles, buses, and vehicles displaying government placards.

Museum of American Finance 
Join us on the anniversary of Alexander Hamilton’s birth for a talk with Dr. Richard Green on Hamilton’s public administration. Dr. Green is Professor of Public Administration and Political Science at the University of Utah. He writes and teaches on the history and theory of public administration, emphasizing its relation to the Constitution and the rule of law, to public ethics and bureaucratic responsibility, and to the American political economy. He is the author of Alexander Hamilton’s Public Administration and co-author of Foundations of Public Administration, and he has authored many journal articles and book chapters in the field. Over the last 35 years, he has studied Hamilton’s ideas and practices of good government as an integral aspect of his research agenda. Presented in partnership with the Alexander Hamilton Awareness (AHA) Society. John Street United Methodist Church, 44 John Street. FREE

Battery Park City Authority
The best art house cinema is characterized by independent filmmakers with uncompromising vision. This series features courageous films inspired by the civil rights movement. Putney Swope is a 1969 satirical comedy film about a black advertising executive. The film satirizes the advertising world, the portrayal of race in Hollywood films, the white power structure and the nature of corporate corruption. Free popcorn will be served, and a discussion will follow the screenings. Mature audiences only. 6 River Terrace.

Brookfield Place New York
Rdical cellist Maya Beiser will debut her immersive performance of Aura Blackstar: Bowie Cello Symphonic Visualized in New York City on January 10 at 8PM at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.

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