Parking in Portland

This story is part of an occasional series exploring

as the city prepares to increase the number of revenue-generating metered spaces.

A couple years ago, Portland Bureau of Transportation managers noticed something peculiar about the daily ticket tallies being uploaded from mobile computers that the city's parking enforcement officers carry.

Officer 116 - Lauren Magnee - was leaving her colleagues in the dust, regularly writing twice as many citations as others patrolling downtown's metered spaces. On the surface, it seemed fishy. So a supervisor decided to shadow Magnee on her foot beat.

"We found out she just walks faster than everybody else - a lot faster," said Nolan Mackrill, who recently retired after two decades as manager of PBOT's parking division. "She does her job very well and very quickly."

In a revenue-generating department charged with making sure there's healthy turnover in the city's limited street parking spaces, officials deny that a quota system exists. But The Oregonian/OregonLive's review of parking tickets issued over nearly four years found a group of high-achieving enforcers who would excel if the city's parking patrol did officially embrace a numbers-driven culture.

Portland's parking enforcement bureau employs 53 enforcement officers. Of 900,944 tickets dished out between Jan. 1, 2011, and Dec. 1, 2014, 24 percent were handed out by just six officers.

Magnee, a six-year veteran of downtown foot beats, was far and away the most productive, issuing 61,026, or 7 percent, of the total number of parking fines during that period. Gary Shervey, who has been on the force since 1997, was a distant second, with 34,921 tickets.

During that period, the number of parking tickets jumped by 14 percent, with the dollar amount from the citations exploding 45 percent to $15.7 million.

High production?

Despite Portland's repeated denials of a quota system, there will always be downtown shoppers and suburban commuters who work in the city who believe otherwise. Certainly, revelations of secret quotas for parking officers in New York and Los Angeles in recent years haven't helped dampen such suspicions.

In fact, a search of thousands of comments that Portland parking officers recorded in connection with tickets they wrote shows that many violators accuse the officers of being part of a grand conspiracy to fatten the city's treasure chest.

"Is this how you steal money from people?" one person asked while getting an overtime citation in 2012.

Of course, that's tame in comparison to the curse words, racial slurs, lies, death threats, profane personal-appearance insults and physical objects hurled at parking officers by many drivers.

See for yourself: The Oregonian/OregonLive has created a searchable database of comments left for the court to see by keyword, automobile make and date.

by Caspio

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(You can also search our database of all parking tickets and see where you rank for number of citations issued since 2011.)

Ticket writers can enter comments on their mobile computers that do not appear on printed tickets. The notes are left in a custom field for the judge to review in case the citation is challenged.

PBOT managers agree that, at first glance, it may appear that some parking officers are on a machine-like mission to churn out more revenue.

But they said there are clear reasons, beyond walking speed, why some write far more tickets than others.

People who patrol meters in the heart of the city naturally spend a big chunk of their workdays writing tickets. The city employs 19 walking and seven bicycling parking officers who handle those areas, rotating through eight-hour shifts.

By contrast, the city's 21 officers who patrol neighborhoods on their scooters devote time to responding to complaints and looking for violations such as leaving vehicles with expired tags on the street. The city also has three abandoned auto inspectors and three officers assigned as dispatchers.

The average officer has been working for 11 years, earning between $21.26 and $25.84 an hour.

Mark Friedman, manager of the city's parking division, said the work of officers who handle neighborhood complaints is valued as much as that of the high-volume ticket writers downtown.

"The number of citations doesn't determine who is a good officer," he said.

Efficient enforcer

Some officers volunteer to do work other than ticketing drivers. They'll put up signs closing spaces for special events or collect money from meters during shifts.

Magnee, 31, avoids those duties.

The city's top ticket-writer prefers to monitor meter spaces in high-density areas, working late shifts that end at 7:15 p.m.

Portland's most productive parking enforcers

Between Jan. 1, 2011 and Dec. 1, 2014, the city issued nearly 901,000 parking tickets. Six of the city's 53 officers accounted for 24 percent of those citations.

1. Lauren Magnee

(61,026)

2. Gary Shervey

(34,921)

3. Louis Sasnett

(34,846)

4. Becky Rhodes

(31,388)

5.

Charr Bridge

(28,711)

6. Adam Gniewosz

(27,935)

On a recent afternoon, she moved briskly through the brick and glass canyons of downtown Portland, a blur bundled up in standard-issue blue and black winter gear.

Hurrying along each block face, Magnee -- bespectacled, petite, her ponytail bouncing with each footstep -- scanned the digital numbers printed on window receipts and punched license plate numbers into a boxy mobile computer without slowing. She covered one 200-foot block in 15 methodical seconds.

"It's not for the job," she said. "I've always walked fast. But it does help my day go by faster if I'm staying active and going quickly."

Magnee said she has walked the same beats so many times that she has memorized the location of every different parking sign.

Spotting something amiss with a black Toyota SUV parked near the Apple Store, she stopped on a dime.

Expired plates and no parking receipt in the windows.

That was good for two tickets adding up to $125.

Rather than wasting precious seconds tearing and stuffing, Magnee prints tickets directly from her handheld computer into the PBOT's dreaded yellow windshield envelopes.

She issues some warnings. "I try to be fair and consistent," Magnee said.

Still, city records show Magnee turned in 31 of the parking division's 33 most productive days over the past four years. On Nov. 6, 2011, for example, she issued 178 citations, or a ticket every 2 minutes and 40 seconds, during a single shift. The next month, on the day after Christmas, she gave out 167 citations.

Driver tales

What do Portlanders say when encountering someone in Magnee's position? It turns out ticket writers are keeping track.

The private comments left for judges provide a glimpse of why parking officers might have trust issues.

'Jerk,' 'fat boy' and other horrible things people call Portland's parking officers 7 Gallery: 'Jerk,' 'fat boy' and other horrible things people call Portland's parking officers

On an afternoon in February 2013, a woman ran up and asked an officer for her name as she issued a ticket for overtime parking near Lincoln High School. "She said she was going to kill herself and was going to put my name on the note why she killed herself," the officer wrote in comments section.

Some officers describe drivers who said they left their cars parked while getting change for the meter, only to then pull out credit cards to pay.

One ticket writer in June reported watching a man park in front of a Northeast Portland fire hydrant, turn on his flashers and walk into a house. As the officer wrote the $150 citation, the driver emerged and said there was nowhere else to park.

"I pointed out several open spaces within eyesight," the officer typed into the comments.

Magnee, who worked at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry ticket counter before joining PBOT, said the frequent verbal attacks are the worst part of her shifts.

People get especially mean during the winter holidays, when they seem to think the city should show more mercy with parking violators, she said. She tries to walk away from the insults without getting into an argument.

PBOT managers said it's not an officer's job to grant people clemency from parking laws, no matter how much violators beg for it when they get a ticket.

Friedman said PBOT trains parking officers in methods to defuse hostile encounters. But he also understands there's something about getting a parking citation that brings out the venom in people.

Friedman recalled the owner of a plumbing truck spitting in his face when he was a rookie officer downtown.

A decade later, Friedman said the same man recognized him as they rode a TriMet bus home.

"I wasn't even in my uniform," Friedman said. "He came up to me and said, 'I did something 10 years ago and I want to apologize,'" Friedman said. "He said he had never stopped feeling bad about spitting on me."

-- Joseph Rose

503-221-8029

jrose@oregonian.com

@pdxcommute

-- Fedor Zarkhin

503-294-7674

fzarkhin@oregonian.com

@fedorzarkhin

-- Interactive database by David Cansler