Parking enforcement upgrade on horizon

BANGOR – Stephen Sleeper has a passion for technology. He carries important business and personal information with him all the time on an electronic organizer, and he works regularly with digital images and graphic designing as part of his downtown business, Sleeper Media Group.

“I love technology,” Sleeper said recently.

But a proposed purchase of hand-held devices that would monitor parking violations in Bangor has him worried.

The devices will allow parking enforcement officers to scan a license plate and identify whether that vehicle is eligible for a courtesy ticket, a $10 parking ticket, or the boot, which affixes to a tire to prevent the vehicle from going anywhere until the fines are paid.

The devices are part of an estimated $40,000 upgrade to the decade-old in-house system that police Chief Don Winslow said worked well in its day. Now it is too cumbersome, particularly in light of discussions of the city going to a new sliding scale for fees for repeat violators.

The upgrade is included in Winslow’s requests for next year’s budget and is expected to be taken up by councilors sometime in May, City Manager Edward Barrett said. The city manager has reviewed the proposal and forwarded it on to the council without making a recommendation either way.

“It’s on a list of items [to be reviewed],” Barrett said Friday. “It’s kind of just sitting there in an undetermined status.”

The sliding scale issue was tabled earlier this year to allow city officials to do further assessments on the costs and benefits on the new system. City officials said it will go back to the council’s transportation and infrastructure committee in May.

The devices would allow the parking attendant to determine automatically the status of a violator, rather than having to visually scan pages of license plate numbers.

Sleeper, whose family for decades operated a clothing store downtown, opposes both the new equipment and the sliding scale. He said the sliding scale is unnecessary and the equipment, he is convinced, could lead to government with too much information about personal habits.

Sleeper said that with the devices, the city could, in Big Brother fashion, track all vehicles parked downtown, not just violators. With no guidelines in place as to what information will be gathered and disseminated, there is potential for misuse, whether by the city or anyone wanting the information, Sleeper said.

“I’m concerned about what it can do,” he said. “It’s extremely powerful.”

City officials insisted this week that nothing nefarious is involved and that information about what vehicles have violated the city’s parking ordinance and on what street the violations occurred already is public information.

“It’s certainly not our intention to use it to see where people are,” Winslow said Thursday. “The intention is to look at the history of a vehicle and see where their violations are.”

The ideas behind the sliding scale fees and hand-held devices are to discourage people downtown from parking all day long in short-term parking areas and to encourage the use of permitted parking areas or the parking garage, freeing up space for customers and other short-term users.

“In a perfect world, people would park where they’re supposed to be parking and there would be space for customers,” Winslow said.

Sleeper contended that the need for discussion is now and not after the system is in place.

“Once you get the cow out of the barn you’re not going to get it back in,” he said.