Placard Abuse Crackdown Pushed By City Council

NEW YORK — No more get-out-of-a-ticket-free cards. The City Council is pushing for a crackdown on parking placard abuse with a new package of bills that would mandate proactive enforcement and bolster oversight.

One of the five bills set to be introduced Wednesday would set up a single application process for city-issued placards. Others would require the city's 311 system to collect complaints about placard abuse, which would serve as the basis for weekly enforcement sweeps.

Officials say the legislation aims to target the abuse of official city placards — which Speaker Corey Johnson called "corruption, plain and simple" — and the dangerous illegal parking tactics that come with it, as well as fake and unofficial permits.

"We are in a transportation crisis and the question of how we allocate our street space is of paramount importance," Johnson, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday. "As we try to fight congestion and encourage modes of transportation like buses and cycling, it is clear that cracking down on placard abuse has to be part of any serious attempt to make navigating our City easier and more efficient for all New Yorkers."

The effort comes amid a lengthy wait for Mayor Bill de Blasio to take more aggressive action against placard abuse, which has been frequently documented on Twitter. State Sen. Kevin Parker of Brooklyn even once told a Senate aide to kill herself in a tweet after she accused him of placard abuse.

De Blasio reportedly announced a crackdown on the problem in May 2017. A year later, he promised an update on the issue "soon" — but one has yet to come.

As of last year there were about 160,000 city-issued permits in circulation, according to amNewYork. One new bill, sponsored by Johnson and Councilman Keith Powers (D-Manhattan), would create a standard application process for new placards and collect information about why they're being requested and how they support a city agency.

Another bill would require at least 50 targeted sweeps for placard abuse based on 311 complaints that would be monitored by the Department of Investigation. Two others would explicitly ban city vehicles from blocking crosswalks, fire hydrants, sidewalks, bike lanes or bus lanes unless there's an emergency and require enforcement officers to have violators towed.

A fifth bill would require 311 to take complaints about placard abuse and illegal parking. Under the bill, the city would have to respond to complaints about any of those aforementioned illegal parking tactics and explain why there was an emergency.

The new package builds on five other bills introduced last year to boost the fine for fake placards and allow for the revocation of placards because of abuse, among other things.

"These new bills will urge City Hall to take placard abuse seriously and invest in strong and smart enforcement measures to hold serial placard abusers accountable," Councilwoman Margaret Chin (D-Manhattan), the sponsor of bills in both packages, said in a statement.

De Blasio's placard abuse crackdown reportedly led to an uptick in tickets — there were 41,931 issued to placard-holding parking scofflaws in 2017, up from 28,269 the year before, amNewYork reported last year.

In a radio interview last month, the Democratic mayor said "a whole new phase of anti-placard abuse initiatives" would be rolled out in February.

"We are getting that message across to public employees that what they thought was acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable," he said on WNYC, according to a transcript.

(Lead image: Photo from Shutterstock)