For years, the city and state have vowed to crackdown on parking placard abuse by lawmakers, police, and other state officials. But despite their best efforts, officials keep getting caught misusing the parking permits, adding to a sense of imbalance between haves and have-nots. But after a new state probe earlier this week which condemned the widespread misuse, the Cuomo administration announced yesterday that new limits will be placed on the placards, and nearly 1,500 state officials will lose theirs. "They may have to circle the block [like everyone else]," said Howard Glaser, Cuomo's state operations director.
From now on, the only state employees eligible for the "official police business" placards are members of the state police. “What we found was a seriously flawed system. It was a system that included the issuance of more than 1,700 State Police placards for politicians and others who were clearly not police officers. It was a system that had no clear guidelines governing the appropriate uses of the placards, which made enforcement of the abuses nearly impossible. Quite simply, it was a system that invited abuse,” said Ellen N. Biben, the state inspector general who launched the probe at Gov. Cuomo's request.
The total number of police placards handed out would be cut from 1,730 last year to 261 this year. In addition, the number distributed to executive agencies and the Legislature will also be reduced from 2,210 to 1,993. We're not sure how all of these changes will affect the special unit within the Internal Affairs Bureau dedicated to just tracking down such offenders. But according to the Times, they must have been doing something a little right, since Bloomberg was able to reduce the number of city placards from about 144,000 in 2007 to about 63,000 in 2010.
One person who was accused of misusing his placard is New York Waterfront Commissioner Ronald Goldstock. The Daily News claimed they caught him using his official police parking placard in order to park for at least six hours under a "No Parking" sign at NYU while teaching a class on corruption last month. Goldstock wrote us yesterday to defend himself from a story he calls "replete with inaccurate and malicious misreporting." He takes umbrage with the News' characterization of his attitude at the time of the confrontation, and claims that they left out certain important facts:
The reporter who interviewed me clearly expected that I was only parked at the law school to teach my class. When I told him that I had also attended a presentation unquestionably within the scope of my duties as Waterfront Commissioner, the Daily News contacted the law school the next day to verify that I had, indeed, been telling the truth. Though the law school confirmed that this was true, the reporters conveniently and inexcusable omitted that critical fact from their story.
