No more tickets for leaving your headlights on

The next time John Seth forgets to turn off his headlights when he parks his car in Seattle, he can rest assured that the worst thing he'll get is a dead battery.

It turns out that leaving the headlights on while a vehicle is parked is perfectly legal under Seattle's code, the commander of the Seattle Police Department's parking-enforcement unit acknowledged yesterday. He also promised to cancel the $28 ticket Seth received last month.

"I couldn't believe this thing," Lt. Steven Paulsen said yesterday after learning of the ticket. "It's a bad ticket. It's bad P.R. ... My decision was, 'Hey, let's get rid of (it).' "

Earlier this week, when asked about Seth's ticket, police officials said just the opposite.

So did the parking-enforcement officer who ticketed Seth on Dec. 9, when he accidentally left his lights on while parked downtown.

" 'We can cite for it, so we do,' " Seth recalls the officer telling him.

Paulsen said the officer, who was relatively new to the job, misinterpreted information from the handheld machines used to issue tickets. The devices list citable offenses, which include the name of each violation and where it appears in city code. The officer saw one violation listed as "Lights, parked vehicle," and assumed it meant that leaving the lights on was an infraction, Paulsen said.

But the machines don't have the actual text of the ordinance, which, in this case, simply describes how all cars — including parked ones — need to have lights that work properly.

Now, Paulsen said, he is having this violation and others that do not require ticketing purged from the system. This way, officers, in the future, won't issue tickets that later turn out to be invalid.

He said others in the department may also have been confused about the headlight law when asked about it earlier this week, though he'd never heard of anyone writing a ticket for it before.

"We don't train our people to write on these sorts of things," he said.

Last year, Mayor Greg Nickels and city officials looked at ways to increase revenues from parking enforcement.

Parking-ticket fines were increased as of Wednesday, and officials projected that 75,000 more tickets could be written annually if parking-enforcement vacancies were filled and the unit focused more on enforcement and less on other tasks, such as providing assistance at community events, said Marianne Bichsel, spokeswoman for the mayor.

But, she said, Seth's ticket was not related to any change in policy.

"We don't say to individual officers, 'You need to write more tickets,' or have individual quotas or anything like that," she said. "We have not ... communicated in any way that (officers should be) overzealous. That doesn't get us where we want to be. It makes people angry."

And it doesn't help with revenue, she said, because questionable or unreasonable tickets probably will be appealed and overturned.

Nor has the department told parking officers — who are civilians working in the Police Department — to write more tickets, Paulsen said.

In fact, he said, the officer got "a funny feeling" right after issuing the ticket. He said she talked to her supervisor, who agreed the ticket should be canceled, but the department couldn't reach Seth.

But Seth says he did call the department to complain about the ticket. "They just kind of hemmed and hawed and said, 'Gee, that's too bad,' " he said.

And, he says, the officer was rude to him, telling him "Merry Christmas" when she gave him the ticket.

Paulsen said the officer has been out of town, so he hasn't been able to talk to her about that.

"We tell (parking officers) to be polite to people and not do anything to discredit the city or themselves," he said.

Seth says he's glad the department is now working to get the ticket canceled through Municipal Court. So is his boss at Film Stop, who paid the ticket because Seth, at the time, was making a delivery for the photo-processing company. Film Stop's co-owner, Steven Epstein, said Paulsen "apologized profusely" yesterday, which he appreciated. Still, Epstein wonders why the officer wrote the ticket in the first place.

"You and I would have had common sense and not done that," he said. "I mean, why ding someone, especially around Christmas?"

Janet Burkitt: 206-515-5689 or jburkitt@seattletimes.com.