Parking Placards

Today is the first workday of the new year for city public school teachers, some 52,000 of whom have a little over a month to prepare for a commute without free parking privileges.

The Post is reporting today that a sweep against illegally parked placard-bearing vehicles has resulted in over 2,400 summonses, almost half of them issued to NYPD employees.

Taking a cue from New York's Brightest, the five unions representing the city's Finest have filed a complaint aimed at undermining city parking reforms by retaining free privileges for police officers, detectives, lieutenants and captains. The Post reports that the complaint "contend[s] the city was required to negotiate the new plan before yanking more than 20,000 permits."

Chinatown, December 2007: As good as it gets?

It took a little longer than expected, but the City is significantly shrinking the pool of parking placards available to public employees. The total number of placards allocated to certain departments -- most notably NYPD -- has been reduced from roughly 80,000 to about 55,000, as reported by the Times, News, and Post this morning. The police will have 21,474 fewer placards to distribute, a 33 percent reduction.

Back in January United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten protested Mayor Bloomberg's mandate to reduce the number government parking placard handouts. In a letter to the mayor, Weingarten called the move "deeply troubling," and claimed that taking free parking away from teachers -- who, unlike tens of thousands of other government employees, "are not abusers of parking permits" -- would keep "the best and the brightest" from accepting jobs in city classrooms. (What this says about transit-using teachers, who must pay for TransitChek cards even as the best and brightest drive and park for free, is anyone's guess.)

They're summonsing their own, and then some.