ANC Commissioner Justin Kopa (CAS ‘03) presented possible solutions to the problem of visitor parking permits at a Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting on Tuesday night. Council members ultimately decided to keep the existing parking system in place.
Neighbors have expressed concern over lack of parking in Georgetown.
Under the current parking system, neighborhood residents may receive a visitor parking pass from the Metropolitan Police Department by supplying the name of the visitor and the license plate number of the car. A permit may be issued for periods up to two weeks and only two times a year to the same visitor.
According to Lieutenant Brian Bray of the MPD Second District, one of the major flaws of this parking system is the difficulty of keeping records of passes issued. The records of permit issuance are taken by hand, making records hard to maintain, Bray said.
“We are working on a way to computerize the system right now, but it is taking some time,” Bray said.
Within the current restrictions, students at Georgetown University may receive visitor parking permits if the car is registered in the District of Columbia.
It is not possible for a student to have a reciprocity permit, which is a permit for an out-of-state car that is good for up to a year.
One alternative proposed by Kopa involved issuing residents a booklet of one-day, scratch-off passes for their guests. Another suggestion was the “hard pass,” where each household would have two passes that they could give visitors at any time.
Kopa also presented an adjudication system in which there would be no passes, but enforcement would continue and residents would send their adjudication passes in with their parking tickets.
“We want to make sure what we propose is enforceable,” said Kopa.
At the April 30 ANC meeting, a motion regarding improvements on the current visitor parking permit system will be discussed.
“The problem is the present system doesn’t work, so we have to fix the present system,” said ANC Commissioner Peter Pulsifer.
