Mayor Bill de Blasio is going to shell out taxpayers’ money to fix a problem he made worse in the first place — with the city hiring 100 new parking enforcers in the wake of his decision to hand out 50,000 parking placards to school staff.
In addition to the new NYPD traffic agents, the mayor will create a 16-member “anti-placard fraud unit” and assign cops to blitz the areas around schools, police station houses and courthouses.
The issue of civil servants taking advantage of parking perks by leaving their cars outside designated areas and hoping they will get away with it is something that “irks New Yorkers” the most,
de Blasio said Wednesday.
He added that abusers were “contributing to traffic congestion” and “starting to erode faith in the integrity of government.”
The mayor also called a recently posted online video — which shows a traffic agent refusing to ticket a vehicle with an NYPD placard — “very powerful” evidence of “a problem in public service we’ve seen for a long time.”
“The notion that we have traffic agents literally walking by obvious violations — that’s not acceptable,” he said.
On May 18, the Department of Education distributed 50,000 placards to teachers, administrators and other staffers, although there are only 11,000 spots reserved for school use.
De Blasio ordered the move after the principals union won a court ruling that overturned then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 2008 decision to slash the number of DOE placards from 63,000 to 11,000.
With 44,496 placards issued to members of the NYPD and another 54,020 handed out by the Department of Transportation to groups such as the FBI, nonprofit organizations and disabled individuals, de Blasio, who will run for re-election this year, put the total number now in circulation at 160,516.
De Blasio said anyone caught misusing a placard would have it “permanently revoked,” with “certain” violators “turned over to the Department of Investigation for further action.”
Asked if cops and teachers would really have their illegally parked cars towed, de Blasio answered, “Sure.”
But an NYPD source predicted few cops would wind up feeling de Blasio’s wrath.
“Nobody is going to put a ticket on a car parked near a precinct,” the source said. “They know that those are the cops’ cars. That’s their area.”
At the same time de Blasio was putting his foot down at PS 359 in the Bronx, The Post spotted several nonofficial police vehicles illegally parked at the 44th Precinct station house.
A black Audi Q5 with Massachusetts plates and a yellow-mesh NYPD vest on the dashboard was sitting on the sidewalk, sandwiching a fire hydrant between it and a car parked on the street.
Meanwhile, a green Jeep Grand Cherokee was parked in a crosswalk, bearing a windshield decal showing an NYPD shield and the words “The Greatest Detectives in the World.”
According to the NYPD Patrol Guide, “there is no valid verifiable defense” available to cops who park on sidewalks or in crosswalks, or block hydrants.
NYPD Deputy Chief Timothy Trainor said, “Commanding officers are being reminded they have to manage those self-enforcement zones.
“One of the things we always enforce are life-safety issues, including no blocking crosswalks or fire hydrants,” he added.
Additional reporting by Joe Parziale