The Heber City Council on Tuesday approved new penalties for parking violations that raised fines but lessened the severity of the offense.
A committee comprising representatives from city staff, the Police Department, Justice Court and Prosecutor’s Office proposed the changes. Assistant City Manager Mark Smedley said the committee drafted the ordinance in part because of events at Main Street Park.
“This has really occurred because of the Heber Market on Main and all of the other events that we’re having. I think we have three to four events during the summer per week, and it has brought a lot of people,” Smedley said. “Mayor (Heidi Franco said) … we need to be careful and conscientious of the residents that live down there … so we’ve brought this proposal to do that.”
The ordinance raised the minimum fine amount from $25 to $50.
“It’s intended to create a meaningful deterrent because the prior amount was so low that people would park illegally as a convenience,” Smedley said.
Late penalties of $50 and $75 apply after 14 and 40 days, respectively. Heber City did not formerly have late penalities for parking tickets and modeled its approach on cities like Park City, Ogden and West Valley City.
Heber City Code Enforcement Officer Travis Price explained that the Police Department will start with written or verbal warnings for unpaid parking tickets and, as a last resort, issue an arrest warrant.
Parking illegally was formerly classified as a Class C misdemeanor and has now been reduced to an infraction, the lowest classification for a criminal charge. Infractions do not appear on a person’s criminal record, while Class C misdemeanors do and may appear during background checks.
Smedley hopes reducing the severity of the charge will place less burden on the Justice Court and reduce the likelihood of residents contesting their parking tickets.
“Sometimes people would get so frustrated that they would say, ‘I want to have a jury trial.’ And because it was a Class C misdemeanor, we would have to go through the process. And it was frivolous to do those types of things on a parking violation,” he said. “Dropping it to an infraction takes that option away from people that just have an axe to grind.”
The new parking ordinance went into effect Tuesday with unanimous City Council approval.