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At the last Mammoth Council meeting, one Town “priority” which was added, thanks to a few citizens speaking up during public comment, was parking.
“There are cars parked in the no parking spots every day,” Lake View Boulevard resident Bob Buehler said. “It’s a safety issue. Could you possibly consider some type of deterrent?”
Buehler suggested raising the parking fine to a $200 minimum, from the current $110.
“There is a hazardous overflow of non-resident parking on residential streets,” said Patrick Bernard, another member of the public and the representative of Snowbird HOA on top of Rainbow Lane. “The chronic winter congestion obstructs daily resident access, and delays snow removal as well as emergency ingress and egress. If you cannot get a town plow blade on the street or a bus safely through due to guest parking, an emergency vehicle cannot pass.”
Bernard urged the council to make the parking problem an agendized issue. He then cited a number of statistics and referred to the problem as a “Canyon Lodge Crisis.”
“Yesterday, there were 81 cars parked on my street and 133 cars parked on Lake View Boulevard … are these 214 cars that are on the residential streets causing most of the issues?” he said. “The answer would be yes.”
Chief of Mammoth Lakes Police Department, Daniel Casabian, added his own data.
“Over the past two weeks, since Christmas Day, we’ve fielded 370 calls for service and written 175 or 180 parking citations, totaling over $33,000,” he said. “It’s a nightmare out there.”
It’s not just Canyon Lodge, Casabian added. The problem persists at Eagle, Meridian Boulevard, and throughout town.
“We’re not able to tow because we don’t have the capacity to store vehicles,” he said.
The Council subsequently voted to add parking as an issue to its next meeting agenda, set for Jan. 21.
The Sheet also asked Casabian for an update on general department matters this week.
The biggest issue is staffing. Due to attrition to other local agencies, the department currently has 13 sworn officers.
To put that in context, the department had 15 sworn officers when it was first launched in the mid-1980s.
And had a peak of 23 sworn in 2006-2007.
Casabian said his goal would be to have 20 sworn.
As to the State Department of Justice investigation into the police shooting of Mammoth resident Jesus Uribe last March, Casabian said DOJ had warned it would take between 18-24 months to complete. We’re currently sitting at month 10.
In regard to parking fines, Casabian noted that when the parking fines were last raised from $45 to $110, it literally had no impact. There was no reduction in violations. So obviously, we have not reached an inflection point regarding that number. The fines could be higher.
“We’ve devoted a lot of staffing hours [to parking enforcement],” he said. “They [officers] could be there all day if they wanted to.”
Casabian was supportive of Town Manager Rob Patterson’s suggestion at the last meeting of hiring an extra code enforcement person, someone who could perform parking enforcement in winter and handle animal control and enforcement issues in the summer.
