Your parking tickets could soon be issued by the New Orleans Police Department instead of the Department of Public Works. One of the city council members who proposed the change says there's a practical reason for it: safety.
"The issues have become particularly contentious in towing areas," Councilman Joe Giarrusso said to WWL's Tommy Tucker.
Giarrusso says that although parking enforcement officers will be civilian employees of the NOPD, he believes the NOPD is better equipped than the Department of Public Works to handle drivers who get aggressive or violent with crews trying to tow their cars.
"Those city employees are not trained to deal with it," Giarrusso said. "They don't have anything to really secure themselves. They're not armed. So it makes it a really tricky situation for them."
Giarrusso told WWL's Tommy Tucker that the switch also makes sense because the NOPD will be able to decide how to handle parking issues during festivals and other special events without having to coordinate with other city agencies.
"From an enforcement aspect, a safety aspect, and a coordination aspect, it all makes good sense," Giarrusso said. "They can decide when they're planning in advance what their deployment is going to be. It also makes for less coordination between two different agencies."
That, Giarrusso said, will make parking enforcement in the city and its planning much more efficient.
"Things move more quickly in government when there's not two or three departments touching something; it's just one," Giarrusso said.
Giarrusso says the council may have to pass an ordinance to make the change official. Still, he expects the switch to happen in the next couple of months.
"The people who hand out the parking tickets, the meter maids, will be under NOPD," Giarrusso said. "They will be civilian employees of NOPD. It's really like a bureaucratic issue. You're just sort of moving people from one department to another, but we have to make sure we dot our 'I's and cross our 'T's and do it the right way."
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