De Blasio Announces New Crackdown On Phony Parking Placards
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- For years, CBS2 has reported on phony parking placards being abused by city employees.
On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new crackdown using technology to help find the fakes.
The owner of a restaurant in Chinatown is grateful, claiming his business has suffered for years.
WATCH: Officials Announce Crackdown on Phony Placards
"The customer, they come to the restaurant they want to pick up their food," the man said. "No room for parking, very difficult this is really ruining my reputation."
No place to park is a common complaint heard all over New York City, and a major contributing factor is the abundance of fake parking placards. In some cases, those with legitimate ones like police officers, firefighters, teachers, and other city employees have been forced to park illegally around their jobs.
"They're metered parking, and if you look down there were a lot of placard parking who didn't pay for that meter ticket," Council Member Margaret S. Chin (D-1st) said.
To fix this, de Blasio announced the city will do away with placards by 2021 and go digital with scanning license plates.
"With the push of a button, traffic agents will know if a car is violating the parking rules and they'll know what consequences they'll bring to bear," the mayor said.
In the meantime, a low-tech sticker system is being tested on 300 Department of Transportation vehicles.
"Placed in the window so you can't transfer them from one car to another, which is a big part of the abuse," de Blasio explained.
The city started cracking down on the issue in 2017 by issuing more summonses, but under his administration even more placards have been given out.
Currently, there are more than 125,000 city placards. The DOT has issued 50,000, the NYPD has issued 44,000, and the Department of Education has issued 31,500.
"Some of those are just by union agreements, some are just common sense realities they need for official business," de Blasio said.
The mayor says he has no plans to scale back efforts to curb abuse, but what about the general lack of parking which seems to force some with legitimate placards to park illegally?
De Blasio says the city is looking into buying parking lots or garages for first responders.
"Our uniformed officers do something very special and powerful for the city, they deserve special consideration," the mayor said.
There's also a bit of leniency at play. In 2017, the rule of thumb was of you abuse the placard you'd lose it. Now offenders get three strikes before it's taken away forever.
Going digital will cost the city $52 million for installation and new equipment.
