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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies.

Most Angelenos know how it feels to get a ticket – it sucks. But worse than moving violations or fix-it tickets are parking tickets. It’s how the City lets you know there are a bunch of bureaucrats in charge and they can’t even let you park your car, get some work done, and bounce.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation, or LADOT, a City department is completely separate from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), a County wide body. The MTA has tried to rebrand themselves as “Metro”, which confuses the issue with Metrolink and Amtrak, both separate transportation entities by themselves. With Los Angeles City having over 40 different public transit providers serving the area, one of the biggest issues facing transportation in Los Angeles is the confusing mess of bureaucracies that don’t work together to get you from A to B. Instead, most of these providers are focused on their individual bottom lines.

But let’s focus on LADOT because these jokers took $133,800,000 in parking citations last year. On top of that they made an additional $41,000,000 in meter revenues. The proposed Total Budget for LADOT’s Fiscal Year 2011-2012 isn’t $174,800,000 – it’s $133,000,000. There is definitely some fuzzy math here, but it works out when you realize it doesn’t matter how they take your money, be it parking ticket, utility, or permit, it all ends up in the General Fund.

More curious about this city department is the employee breakdown found in the Proposed Budget Detail of Department Programs Volume II… There are 0 bus drivers on the payroll – they are all contracted out. The Transportation Department doesn’t employ any bus drivers. But there are 1,341 employees on the payroll with 628 employed as Traffic Officer II, whose primary task is to enforce parking enforcement. 47% of the people working for our transportation department are meter maids.

LADOT’s focus on parking as opposed to transportation, is highlighted by the 36,000 on street parking meters, 117 off-street parking lots with 11,285 parking spots. There is a lot of money in parking, as an urban on-street parking space costs $1,341 annually. To build a parking spot in a parking structure in LA it costs $16,842 per parking space, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

For the last 3 budget cycles, city assets have been auctioned off to the private sector as the financial hole we are in continues to grow. During this last cycle, City Council appeared to be on the fence on several parking structures, ready to sell solid revenue streams at a discount. They eventually stayed parked and didn’t collapse under the pressure of developers and short term solutions. It should be a no brainer to keep solid assets capable of generating consistent revenue streams, but in this City, that sort of prudent financial decision is worth a mention.

Our elected officials don’t have the confidence that they can manage a parking lot, hence their entertaining the idea of privatization. It is literally a cement block with 2 moving parts, a gate and an escalator. If our elected officials and city government can’t even manage a parking structure, how can we expect these clowns to effectively manage a 4,000,000 person city?