Oakland parking problem: City of Oakland's Karen Boyd is just plain wrong on tickets

More evidence that the City of Oakland does not care about the needs of residents or their economic position and how it's being negatively impacted by the economy and Oakland's new predatory parking policy.

According to a CBS report, a woman in downtown Oakland who commonly parks in front of her own driveway got a ticket for the first time, causing her to have a fit and claim that the City of Oakland is issuing more tickets.

Moreover, Oaklanders in the area of Adams Point at Oakland Avenue and Harrison were really upset over the increased parking enforcement practices.

"It seems like an overall hike in the level of aggressiveness," said Garcia. "I have paid $1500 in parking violations in 18 months."

But for some reason Acting City Communications Director Karen Boyd had to step in and make a typically defensive (for the City of Oakland) and totally wrong statement regarding Oakland parking tickets issued, as well as fail to apologize for the troubles the Oaklanders was facing. Karen said:

"There's been a perception that the ticket-giving is up. In fact our records indicate that in fact it's actually slightly down," said Boyd. CBS writes, "According to Boyd, the city is issuing an average of 39,000 tickets a month compared to 43,000 a month last year."

Nothing personal, but Karen Boyd forgets that number of tickets issued should be much lower than that for 2008 and not "slightly" lower than in 2008. Why? The economy. Many more Oaklanders are unemployed and thus not using their cars. Almost one of every five Oaklanders are unemployed; that was not true in 2008.

Moreover, with the City of Oakland's parking tow sting in force, tow truck drivers have told me that they're taking cars off the road and are worried about their market drying up!

The bottom line is that for Oakland to be so close in tickets issued to what were given out last year proves that the City of Oakland's being more aggressive in giving out tickets and towing cars in 2009.

How does one spell relief from the City of Oakland's nasty treatment of Oaklanders just for raising a buck? I-n-i-t-i-a-t-i-v-e. The City of Oakland has officially upset so many people that there's an active movement to do for parking tickets what Proposition 13 did for property taxes.

If I were reading this and I were Oakland's City Administrative Officer, I'd be very concerned. Change is coming.