Malibu is home to a new batch of celebrities—but these are no movie stars.
An initiative by the City of Malibu to train 10 citizen volunteers to issue parking tickets within city limits has quickly garnered worldwide attention, with news outlets from as far away as Europe calling to interview Denise and Daniel Villefort, the volunteer leaders.
“I can’t believe all the calls we’ve been getting,” volunteer Daniel Villefort said. “BBC? How did they hear about us?”
Sandi Turner, the City of Malibu’s recently hired new media information officer, said she has fielded at least 10 interview requests from various media outlets since July 8, her first day at the city.
In several reports, including on Fox News, local radio station KPCC and local television stations NBC 4 and KTLA 5, the volunteers have been interviewed and shadowed as they draw chalk lines to mark how long a car has been parked in Malibu’s Civic Center.
“NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams also covered the new program in a short national segment.
“Here’s just what we need: Volunteers handing out actual parking tickets,” Williams said.
So why all the attention?
“I’m not sure why, to be honest,” said Thorsen. “I think it just brings news because it’s Malibu. This is something the [Los Angeles County] Sheriff’s Department does in other jurisdictions. They routinely train volunteers for these type of efforts.”
Lynwood, Claremont and Oceanside similarly train public safety volunteers to issue parking citations.
Among the issues raised by critics is a possible abuse of enforcement power, and whether volunteers will be asked to appear in front of a hearing officer if a ticket is challenged in court.
Daniel Villefort said he did not expect that to be a problem, in a June interview with The Malibu Times.
“If a person is fighting the ticket I have no doubt that we have to go to court, and when I talked with [the sheriff ’s department] they said very few people fight the ticket because we take pictures,” Villefort said.
One local television producer told The Malibu Times the volunteer angle of the story was timely because of the controversial George Zimmerman verdict.
“[Zimmerman] was a volunteer, these guys are volunteers,” the producer said.
Law enforcement officials who have helped train the Malibu volunteers, however, say that comparison is far off.
“They don’t carry a gun like deputies,” said Shawn Brownell, a community relations officer with the Sheriff’s Department who helped organize the Malibu Volunteers on Patrol when it was founded in 2010.
“We’re not trying to create confrontation,” Denise Villefort said. “This [ticketing] is just something we’re now trained to do.”
Some have also tied in the ticketing with the recent release of the “Our Malibu Beaches” access app for smartphones, which identifies public access points to beaches throughout Malibu—perhaps a kind of city response to an expected increase in visitors from the app.
“Public beach access in Malibu is so contentious—with beach-goers and homeowners competing for parking—that even this effort has been viewed with suspicion,” wrote KPCC reporter Eric Zassenhaus.
Beach access app creator Jenny Price, a longtime public access advocate, predicted in a conversation with Zassenhaus that any increase in ticketing near big beaches like Surfrider would strain relationships between visitors and public safety officials. She also argued that officials were further ignoring problems associated with private homeowners who block off public access near their residences.
“I think that is really interesting that they’re so concerned about this parking near the big public beaches, and yet they’ve shown no concern at all about the really serious problem of blocking off public parking by private homeowners,” she told KPCC.
Brownell says the new enforcement method is being blown out of proportion, especially since volunteers’ time is limited.
“It’s a 10-person volunteer team and they have to pair up when they go out. They’re only out there three or four hours at a time,” Brownell said. “I can’t really see them making an impact on tourists or residents who are illegally parking.”
VOP members are required to serve at least 16 hours per month. Brownell said he read comments on a local website with people complaining about having received tickets from the VOP on a weekday, which he said could not have been possible.
“They didn’t even start issuing tickets until the 20th,” he said.
Villefort and the rest of the squad started issuing citations last weekend along Cross Creek Road in the Civic Center, where the city recently installed a three-hour parking limit on 29 spots. Officials said the VOP will mostly focus on enforcing parking on residential roads and in the Civic Center, not Pacific Coast Highway.
“We mainly want them to concentrate on the Civic Center,” Thorsen said.