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Palo Alto Online

Zen and the art of chalking

by Grace Rauh

Oscar Vilorio may not know your name, but he recognizes your car.

On a sweltering sunny afternoon he pauses beside a silver Mercedes on High Street to focus for a moment.

"Two hours and 40 minutes," he says confidently before punching the license-plate number into his hand-held computer. It beeps back, indicating the car has exceeded the two-hour time limit. The screen shows it was sitting curbside for exactly two hours and 46 minutes. Vilorio smiles proudly before printing out a ticket. He knows when a car's time is up.

As a parking enforcement officer, Vilorio spends his days walking downtown Palo Alto's streets, monitoring parking with his handy computer and writing tickets to the unlucky, forgetful, and lazy who leave their cars sitting for more than two hours. The compact Vilorio looks fit in his snug white polo shirt with "police" written across the back and his radio strapped to his side. A baseball hat with a Palo Alto police patch and wraparound sunglasses complete the look.

Last year parking tickets brought in $1.5 million for the city. The money is returned to the general fund and most is used to cover overhead costs, according to Palo Alto Police Chief Lynne Johnson. However, the city does make some money off the tickets.

"But that's not why we do parking enforcement," Johnson said. "If we didn't have the parking turnover it would be very, very difficult for people to find parking in certain parts of town."

During the 2001-2002 fiscal year the city issued 55,420 parking tickets -- up from 53,341 the year before.

"It is probably not the most coveted position... because quite honestly it can be quite a negative position," Johnson said of the city's eight parking enforcement officers. "Very few people thank them for getting a parking citation."

For a man in an often-loathed profession, Vilorio is surprisingly happy about his work, which he says he loves.

He takes a relaxed and even Zen-like approach to people whom become irate when they find a ticket on their windshield, he said.

"To be honest with you most people like us -- most people don't want to get caught," said Vilorio, who has worked in Palo Alto's parking enforcement department for four years.

And when ticket holders lose their temper with him?

"It's more of a disappointment with themselves," he said. "Nobody likes a parking ticket, that's common."

Vilorio issues an average of 50 tickets a day but that number shoots up when the parking enforcement team cites for missing front license plates once a month, he said. He braces himself for the worst reactions on those days. Many people do not realize that not having front and back plates in California is illegal, he said.

"They are totally convinced because in 10 to 15 years they have never gotten a ticket for that."

Vilorio is employed by the Palo Alto Police Department, but is not trained to intervene in criminal actions. He is an extra set of eyes on the street and can call in any suspicious or unlawful doings on his radio, he said.

"Sometimes I have walked into situations where people have stopped whatever they were starting to do because they saw me."

Angry ticket-recipients have yet to really threaten Vilorio's safety. The only incident he ever called in occurred when an inebriated man pushed him aggressively on the street. It had nothing to do with a parking ticket.

From his vantage point, Vilorio has witnessed a full range of emotional responses to parking tickets. Most people approach him nicely, he said, but others come on gruffly from the start and try to intimidate him.

"You see all kind of faces, all kind of acting, all kind of excuses," he said. "When it comes to parking it doesn't matter if you're dealing with an engineer or a doctor. When it comes down to parking, people don't understand what's going on."

No one has tried to slip Vilorio any cash to 'look the other way,' but he has received free dinner offers from downtown restaurants and some business owners have extended similar treats.

He isn't a total stickler and during a recent beat walk, Vilorio didn't cite a truck parked in a red zone. He would rather it sit there than double park in the road, he said.

Vilorio follows the "spirit of the law" more than "the letter of the law," and times his walk to return to cars just over two hours after he passed them originally, he said.

He has heard every excuse and isn't too sympathetic to the average two-hour zone abuser, but said he could be swayed to forgive a ticket if a person came running up just a few minutes too late.

"I'll appreciate the effort," he said.

Grace Rauh can be e-mailed at grauh@paweekly.com