Parking and the City
Someone Has to Be in Charge of the Constant Challenge
That Is Miami Beach Parking

 By Rebecca Wakefield

Saul Frances circles the block again in his black Lexus, license plate IPARKRZ. “Is she leaving?” he asks, noting a woman with a prime Pennsylvania Avenue parking spot sitting inside her car. She isn’t leaving. “We might have been better off parking at the Deuce,” he admits.

Turn the corner. There’s an old man with wispy white hair standing by the open door of his maroon sedan. Frances rolls down his window and leans out. “Excuse me sir, are you leaving?”

“No,” the man chuckles with a mixture of personal triumph and commiseration. “It’s gonna be tough around here.”

I smell a setup. Saul Frances is, after all, the man who runs Miami Beach’s $22 million a year parking department. Trying to park on South Beach is often a hellacious exercise in misanthropy. Surely the system works for at least one guy in town. He plays dumb. Or not dumb, exactly. More like somebody who earned his public service stripes in Mayberry. “We have to set the example and park legally,” Frances explains. “That’s one of my pet peeves.”

Yeah, OK, I’ll buy that for now, if only because my belly is full of San Loco tacos, the 14th Street eatery across from Club Deuce, a neon-lit cavern perpetually teeming with tourists, hipsters, drag queens and other fans of the $4 bottled beer. I asked Frances to lunch simply because I needed to understand about parking on Miami Beach.

Public parking, even in paradise, reveals humanity at its basest. I want to hate Frances. I want it to be his fault that too many cars compete for too few spaces, while the twin scourges of valet companies and roaming packs of tow trucks plague our streets.

Frances is a stylish bureaucrat with a kind of evolved Miami Vice look (fastidiously gelled hair, neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, gold jewelry, casually tailored suits). He vaguely resembles how Judd Nelson might have turned out had he shed his Brat Pack heritage and grown up to become the assistant principal of a middle school. He’s a nice fellow who says “my goodness” a lot, and is newly married to Mayor David Dermer’s secretary, Francis. The mayor delights in calling her Francis Frances. She pretends this is still funny.

Saul Frances likes his job and not just because of the $127,000 a year salary that comes with it. He dreams in citywide grids and eagerly thumbs the latest issue of The Parking Professional magazine. (When asked what the centerfold is like, he blushes noncommittally.) He watches movies for the gratuitous parking meter shots. During a recent trip to an Orlando theme park, he gushed about the 10,000-space parking garage at Universal. His kids advised him to get a life.

The city governs about 13,200 parking spaces, which includes 8,300 metered spaces, six garages and 63 surface lots. There are 14 different residential parking zones, up from just eight a few years ago. Clearly, there are many more cars than spaces. And that’s not even counting all the parking meters rented out from under us by the bastards running valet companies, or outfits filming the latest thrilling installment of South Beach. I asked whether I could rent a hood to put over my very own meter, but was told this just wasn’t possible.

People like the residential zones because it keeps the riff-raff, i.e., you, from taking their spots. But most people have neither time, nor the energy to follow the city process — especially considering the unwieldy nature of the 19-member Transportation and Parking Committee — the body parking ideas have to go through before getting to the City Commission. The department also fights the preconception many people have about any changes being motivated by the dastardly revenue-generating schemes of the city.

On Frances’ desk on the eighth floor of the old City Hall building on Washington Avenue is a phone message log, which includes requests by residents to create special zones just for their streets. The trickiest problems come in places like South Pointe, where residential and commercial zones are closely layered. Wealthy condo residents lament the noisy debauchery of the “car alarms and folks doing things,” he pauses delicately, “that are not right, quite frankly.”

To spare Frances the need to blush again, I later ask one of his subordinates, parking enforcement manager Kevin Perkins, to elaborate. “Our officers will be ticketing and in the cars people are, um, expressing their love for each other,” he offers. “The officer puts the citation on the car and pretends nothing’s happening. It’s cheaper than a hotel, I guess.”

May I humbly suggest a new revenue scheme involving decked-out city vans rented by the hour? Fascinated, I ask Perkins for more tales from the streets. He reveals that his staff encounters “a lot of naked people and flashers in the alleys.” Revelers frequently pass out in their cars and then don’t want to get out when the tow truck comes. Every so often such people wake up in the back of their cars, inside a tow yard.

Parking enforcement is an arms race, as the public and its hapless servants continuously attempt to outwit each other. There are somewhere between 700 and 1,200 tickets issued every day on Miami Beach. Some folks will put their tickets on other people’s cars, hoping they’ll be paid. Others try ignorance or name-dropping to get out of tickets. “I had a customer call me and berate me for getting a ticket,” Perkins recalls. “He has a citywide permit, which is usually given to people on the city boards. I said, ‘Where did you get the ticket?’ He said it was 191st Street and Collins Avenue.” Perkins gently reminded him that his permit worked only in the actual city of Miami Beach, not the entire coastline of Florida. Celebrities and rich kids tend to just park and pay the tickets. What’s $18 to a guy driving a Porsche?

Most of Frances’ days are spent less in the streets and more in the dutiful pursuit of more efficient means of barely controlling the chaos on them. One recent Thursday, he receives a visit from Marty Siegel, an Autocite rep who has come to sell the latest version of the ticket generators the parking enforcement types use to enrage the public. Siegel is a slight, bald gentleman in a dark suit, prone to the telling of cheesy jokes. But the little machine he’s hawking is a model of citizen behavior modification.

Siegel says the new model is capable of taking photos and recording sound, handy features for the inevitable confrontations between meter maids and the parking scofflaws who scorn them. “You wouldn’t do it for every ticket,” he adds, “just when people get angry.”

“Every other ticket, then,” Perkins quips, one of a half-dozen staffers at the presentation.

“I was going to be kind and say one out of 10,” says Chuck Adams, the grizzled fellow in charge of the department’s off-street parking. “We would want to take pictures of valet citations because they are always disputed. The valets just hire a lawyer to waste our time.”

“Is [the machine] tested for the four-foot drop or the 80-mile throw?” Frances asks.

Siegel assures that this model has even been used by a parking officer to bludgeon a citizen combatant about the head. So, yes, it is urban warfare ready. “But the idea is to stop a conflict before it starts,” he adds.

Of course, the parking officials agree.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.