The next time you get a parking ticket, consider this before yanking out a fistful of hair: You've just made a contribution to fighting crime and keeping the streets clean.

In Santa Barbara, parking tickets bankroll 10 percent of the police force, and 100 percent of the street-sweeping program, which is expanding to the unserved portions of the Mesa on July 1.

All told, those pesky parking attendants – officially known as parking enforcement officers – last year doled out 92,000 parking tickets. That’s one for every resident in Santa Barbara. At $40 apiece, with some penalties doubled for late payments, the tickets amounted to a whopping $4.2 million last year.

In the fiscal year ending in July of 2006, about $2.3 million from parking tickets went to the Santa Barbara Police Department; nearly $1 million went to the street sweeping program. The DMV and the county health department took the balance.

This fiscal year, which is over at the end of next month, it appears the numbers are down. Officials aren’t expecting even $2 million for the police department, whose union recently accepted a salary raise of 26.5 percent over three years.

But the dip in citations does not necessarily mean people are mastering the 75-minute shuffle. In fact, by most indications, they are not.

“There are some people who get a ticket every single week,” said Browning Allen, the city’s transportation manager. “It’s unbelievable.”

Rather, the crux of the problem seems to lie on the city’s end. For some reason – possibly the high cost of living in Santa Barbara – until recently the city had a difficult time staffing its 12-member force of parking officers. (Parking officers make up to $48,000 a year, according to the city’s Web site.)

The city also had a problem filling all of its positions for crossing guards at public schools. This meant that parking attendants had to fill the gap – good news for errant parkers, but bad news for the budget.

Presently, the city does not appear to be ailing financially. Largely due to a recent surge in tourism – which led to a boost in taxes generated from hotel visitors – as well as healthy property tax rolls, Santa Barbara is on pace to pass a balanced budget, said Bob Samario, the city’s assistant finance director.

This means that, despite the shortage of payments received from the dreaded green envelopes, the city should have no problem paying its 140-member police force. Each officer now earns between $60,700 and $73,800 a year, Samario said.

Meanwhile, parking tickets have kept the street-sweeping department in business since Day One. That was five years ago, when the city kicked off the program with a one-day windfall of $80,000.

In July, the program will expand its footprint for the fifth time by adding some streets on the Mesa. This will increase the share of city blocks served from about 70 percent to 80 percent.

After July 1, the only major portion of the city’s sweepable stretches left unattended will be San Roque, which the city plans to add to the mix in July of 2008, Allen said.

(Hilly areas such as the Riviera are out of reach due to their narrow winding roads.)

The vehicle vacuums, which in Santa Barbara are owned and operated by a contracting company named Continental Janitorial Service, cost around $425,000 each.

Whether the benefits of having cleaner streets outweigh the costs of irking residents is a subjective question. Especially in light of how it tends to be the poorer residents -- those without the luxury of having a  garage -- who bear the brunt of the cost.

"Conventional widsom holds that rich people subsidize poor people," said David Pritchett, a close watcher of city politics who has made some noise about parking-ticket inequities. "This is the other way around."

But the answer to how much of a difference street sweeping makes is quantifiable.

“It’s estimated that we’ll be removing 1,000 tons of debris next fiscal year,” Allen said. “That’s 2 million pounds of soda cans and bottles, paper, wrappers from fast food, leaves, dirt. They’ve pulled diapers off the street, you name it. Plus remnants of car debris – droppings in the oil.”

On a daily basis, that amounts to about 8,000 pounds of rubbish, which is equal to the weight of two mid-sized cars. So are people doing their city a service by breaking this particular law?

“In some respects,” Allen said.

However, Deputy Police Chief Rich Glaus made a point of saying that, ultimately, the city wants people to play by the rules, even when it comes to parking.

“You can’t deny that there’s revenue attached to it, but on the other hand, the whole purpose is to get people to comply with the law,” he said. Still, he said, if everyone magically stopped parking illegally, “then we’d have a real revenue issue.”


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