AREA NEIGHBORHOOD COMMISSION ANC Proposes Alterations To Parking Regulations By Alex Finerman Hoya Staff Writer

Addressing what Advisory Neighborhood Commission member Justin Kopa (COL ’03) called “a constant frustration,” area residents and D.C. officials met April 9 to discuss the problem of local parking. Discussion centered around the current structure of visitor parking permits, and ideas on how to improve the system.

The event was organized by the Traffic and Parking Committee, a task force assembled by Kopa. The Tuesday meeting at Georgetown Visitation was arranged as a way for the committee to present its ideas and proposals to the public and solicit input from residents. This was part of a broader effort by the task force assembled by Kopa to address community parking issues. In addition to ANC members, the task force includes representatives from the Department of Public Works, Department of Motor Vehicles and the etropolitan Police Department. On April 30, the committee will present its recommendations and send a report to the mayor’s office.

Visitor parking passes were the primary bone of contention for residents of the community. Georgetown students can request passes for visitors, but the current system makes it a difficult process, since it requires passes that can only be distributed at MPD district headquarters, an inconvenient trip for carless students. Under the current system, residents can request a visitor permit from the MPD by supplying the name of the visitor and the car’s license plate number. Requests for a visitor are limited, however, to periods of up to two weeks and at most twice per year.

The key focus in the report is the poor coordination among departments responsible for enforcement. “There are too many different city agencies doing each other’s jobs,” ANC Commissioner and committee member Justin Wagner (COL ’03) said. According to Wagner, the report’s main recommendation is to appoint someone to coordinate the parking policies. The current enforcement system is “a classic example of government bureaucracy and red tape,” Wagner said.

Connected with better coordination to enforce the rules is a recommendation to better educate the public. “No one really knows what the rules and regulations are,” Wagner said. “Someone has to get them out.” The task force is advising the mayor’s office to form a communications plan that makes the community aware of what the laws are. To ease the parking strain, the committee is also recommending that the city publicize that Georgetown is easily accessible by public transportation.

Aside from improvements to the current system, the task force suggested three ways to change the system for visitor passes. A “hang-tag” system would give each household a number of passes, with each one valid for a day. Visitors would scratch off dates in a way similar to instant-win lottery games, which would help prevent counterfeit and reused passes.

In another system, a number of “hard tags,” most likely two, would be distributed to a household. Guests would receive these from their hosts and return them at the end of their stay. The tag would be decaled and bar-coded to prevent forgery.

Their final recommendation calls for adjudication passes. Visitors would park on the street without any passes and receive a ticket. Instead of paying for the citation, visitors would receive from their hosts an adjudication to remit instead of payment for any citations received.

After hearing residents’ opinions, the consensus was that the best way to proceed was by trying to improve the current system before introducing any new method. “We don’t want to make wholesale changes until we get better enforcement,” Wagner said. According to Kopa, refining the current system is the best option until the city can organize its enforcement and implementation efforts strongly enough to warrant trying one of the other methods. Community members also raised fears that the proposed systems would be susceptible to fraud.

These changes would mostly not affect students, unless they are parked illegally. All residential communities require a residential parking permit for cars registered in Washington, D.C., and cars registered elsewhere are not allowed to park in the District for more than 30 days, according to Kopa. Overall, Kopa said the committee was just figuring out “how to make it harder to park in Georgetown for people who aren’t supposed to be parking in Georgetown.”