Posted on 08/04/2017 7:08:21 PM PDT by Mark
LOS ANGELES (FOX 11 / CNS) - The City Council on Wednesday approved a $650,000 payout for a man who successfully fought how the city of Los Angeles processes challenges to parking tickets. Cody Weiss, who sued the city in 2014 after he received a parking ticket, argued that the city unlawfully allows a private for-profit company to process challenges to tickets. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled in his favor last year, and the decision was upheld by the Second District Court of Appeal. City Attorney Mike Feuer petitioned the California Supreme Court to review the appellate decision, but the state's high court denied the petition in November and upheld the lower court's decision ordering Los Angeles to change its practice of allowing the Xerox company to handle reviews of challenges to parking tickets.
Caleb Marker, an attorney for Weiss, and the Los Angeles City Attorney's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Weiss argued that his ticket, which he received for parking longer than the posted time limit, was wrongfully issued. The court found a problem with the fact that the initial review was handled by a company called PRWT, a subcontractor for Xerox. An investigation by local news outlet NBC4 found that PRWT automatically denied most ticket appeals, even when strong evidence was presented that someone was wrongly ticketed. In 2014, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant wrote in a tentative ruling, which was eventually upheld, that only the city "as issuing agency'' can conduct initial reviews, "and it may not delegate that task to its processing agency, Xerox.'' Chalfant cited a 1995 change in state law that said only the agency that issues a citation can conduct reviews. "The judge correctly applied the law,'' Marker said in 2014 about Chalfant's ruling. "The city and Xerox have been in violation of the law since 1995, when the law changed.''
And WE are supposed to ‘bail out’ these clowns as they sink deeper into bankruptcy, wring their collective hands and wonder why.
As to the jury...They sure stuck it to the CITY OF LOS ANGELES didn’t they.
That they are ‘serving’ on the jury would make one think they pay taxes (well, on the tax roll) and would themselves be paying this ‘judgement’ out of their own pockets.
We need tort reform for parking tickets.
It’s a good example of why healthcare cost are way out of line.
A little more sting for the sanctuary city. Drip, drip, drip.
The thought of Xerox being a gatekeeper of due process seems a bit scary to me. Whoever in city government thinks that was a good idea and inked a contract might consider running for the DNC chair sometime soon? Next we will have some Alawi family in Pakistan running our DMV?
If the City full the law they wouldn’t have had the problem to begin with.
full...followed.
Trying to figure out why he deserves $650K, while every other parker who got a photocopied rejection letter gets nothing.
Give them a break.
They need $$$ badly.
Their Undocumented citizen residents are costing more than they said they would and paying less in taxes.
But they will pay off in the long run.
This is how far the privatization of essential government functions has proceeded. The opposition to Trump and his supporters is on account of this crony capitalist corruption. It runs very very deep.
Clinton and Algore started it with "reinventing government" but it really took off in DC after 9/11, DHS and Cheney's corporate friends.
If you need a Xerox of your ticket, it’s $1.
The 2nd was again in the FQ where you have to use valet parking. 3 years later the city tracked me down with a ticket I never knew about. The valet obviously just threw the ticket out knowing it would be my problem.
I want the number of his lawyer.
In this case this is a wonderful outcome.
The government was in the wrong, it cannot delegate its powers to a private company who basically set it up so that there was no way to contest a ticket. It was doing the wrong thing for 2 years and this case just shoved it down their throats.
Imagine all the regular people since 1995 that got screwed by this. 650,000, the la govt got of easy.
22 years, not 2. For 22 years his private company screwed people with the delegated blessing of la govt.
“Imagine all the regular people since 1995 that got screwed by this. 650,000, the la govt got off easy.”
Not if there’s now a class action lawsuit against the city. $650k may just be a downpayment on millions, most of which the bottom-feeding lawyers would get, a CAL could yield. But for me, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the “help” it would give to bankrupting the City of Los Angeles.
Caleb Marker
Partner
Phone: 877-500-8780
Fax: 877-500-8781
Email: caleb.marker@zimmreed.com
“The thought of Xerox being a gatekeeper of due process seems a bit scary to me. Whoever in city government thinks that was a good idea and inked a contract might consider running for the DNC chair sometime soon? Next we will have some Alawi family in Pakistan running our DMV?”
Every process they applied their “expertise” to, turned to crap. Google Baltimore tickets or Texas Medicaid.
I’m definitely going to send a demand letter for a ticket I received a couple years back which is an identical circumstance. I still have all the correspondence on it. It irked me that they rejected my contest of it when the law specifically stated the area had to be signed and I provided pictures!
$650,000 makes no sense. What’s the justification?
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