City Can't Ask You to Move Car, Pay Ticket If Street Not Swept: Attorney

City officials said last week citizens need to pay for tickets whether streets are swept or not

A San Diego attorney said the city can't ask you to move your car or pay a street sweeping ticket if your street wasn't swept the day the ticket was issued.

Jeremy Robinson, an attorney at Casey, Gerry, Schenk, Francavilla, Blatt and Penfield law firm, said the city has to sweep a street in order to ticket.

"Because the city has to provide some type of service in exchange for money," Robinson explained. "The government can't just take its citizens' money with no reason. They have to have some rational basis for doing that, and here they don't have that."

In March, city leaders said 70 percent of their street sweeping fleet was not functioning on any given day.

Andrew Kleise, the city's deputy director of stormwater and transportation, said at a March committee meeting that if citizens got tickets on days when they believed their street wasn't swept, officials would use GPS data to verify whether the street was skipped.

“They can confirm whether a street sweeper went down the street that day with the GPS; we’ll be able to confirm it,” said Kleise. “Obviously, if there’s a mistake, we’ll correct that and refund the ticket,” he said in March.

NBC7 Investigates and Eric Busboom at the San Diego Regional Data Library requested and analyzed that GPS data Kleise mentioned.

We found thousands of instances where GPS data showed no sweeping, but tickets were issued anyway.

The city now says that GPS data is incomplete and people have to pay their tickets whether their street gets swept or not.

Robinson disagrees.

"If you're parked in a lane and you're getting a ticket because the street sweeper is going to come by, and the city knows the street sweeper isn't going to come by, then they are ticketing you for no reason," he said "They're not providing a service in exchange for anything, so in that circumstance, they have an obligation to refund the ticket."

This map shows where the most tickets were issued between January 2014 and May 2015, according to city data.

Busboom made this heat map showing the areas he found where tickets were issued on dates and in locations where the city's GPS data doesn't show a sweeper in the area.
 

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