FOX 5 Investigates: Ticketing Tango

WASHINGTON, D.C. - No one likes parking tickets. But when there’s nowhere else to park, sometimes you take a chance.

“$50! Are you kidding me?”

But there’s a bit of a brouhaha over in Friendship Heights.

"That is utterly ridiculous. If he was a cop, OK. But I mean he's just some guy in a little car that toddles around.”

Because it’s not the police writing pricey tickets. It’s a security guard.

"You're supposed to call out for help and he's supposed to come running, not penalize you for parking to get tea," say Danielle Kirk as she pulls off the $50 ticket from her windshield. Kirk is parked in front of a small shopping center along Willard Avenue. With a Panera, a Chipotle and a Chinese restaurant, the shopping center attracts a ton of traffic.

But with only three legal street spaces, even the illegal spots are hard to get.

That’s prime pickings for this security guard, who we found circling the shopping center every 10 minutes, snagging drivers like Kirk.

"I know I was parked illegally,” she says. “But I was literally in there for five minutes."

Julian Mansfield is the Village Manager for Friendship Heights. He says, “We do have a very small jurisdiction. Our entire jurisdiction is less than a mile of roads."

Mansfield says when it comes to parking tickets, towns like Friendship Heights can pretty much do whatever they want.

“We have the ability to issue our own regulations, but Montgomery County has to approve our regulations," Mansfield told FOX 5.

That’s because Maryland has a very unusual law that allows towns to become a “special tax district” or “incorporated,” which in turn allows them to govern themselves. There are about 20 of these independent communities in Montgomery County alone.

View Incorporated Towns & Special Tax Districts in a larger map

FOX 5 found places like Takoma Park and Gaithersburg use civilian “traffic enforcement” to write their tickets. Rockville and Chevy Chase choose to use their police force.

"If you're incorporated, you can have your own government, if you can afford it, you can have your own police department," says Chief Ron Gordon of the Chevy Chase Village Police Department. Parking tickets, he says, “are just part of their beat, their regular patrol duty to write citations. They go out, mark the vehicles and come back in two hours. If they are still there, they will issue a ticket."

In Chevy Chase and Friendship Heights, parking violators write their checks out to “Montgomery County.” 75 percent of the money goes back to the Village, which the County gets the remaining 25 percent in return for processing the tickets.

"We feel it’s a good fit for the County police because they don't have to really occupy themselves with parking enforcement," says Mansfield.

He says the Village is so strict about parking because they’ve learned the hard way, if they don’t enforce the rules, people will leave their cars illegally parked all day and jump on the Metro at the Friendship Heights station. He says for every complaint, there are plenty of happy residents who have a place to park.

But FOX 5 found some drivers, especially cabbies, have figured out the system. Friendship Heights owns the street running along the West side of the shopping center, while Montgomery County owns the street running along the front, or South side, of the shopping center.

That means the security guard can write tickets along the West side, but has to skip past any violators in front of the shopping center. We watched as he was forced to pass a line of cab drivers who regularly park along the front side to run inside and grab food.

“Certainly, it’s a source of revenue for us," Mansfield says. "It’s not the largest source, but it does offset some of our expenses.”

He says he’s getting call from other towns who are thinking about using security guards to write tickets-- which means the next time you’re ready to gamble on that spot, it’s not just the police you ought to worry about.