New Tech is Coming

El Cerrito will buy new License Plate Reading cameras and start using them to issue tickets in January or February 2025, according to Police Chief Paul Keith.

The cameras and software will be compatible with a new plan the city is going to develop for parking around the Plaza BART station and other areas with time-limited parking and residential parking permits, he said. (The city has hired consultant Dixon Resources Unlimited to work on a new parking plan.)

Chief Keith told the City Council that License Plate Reading cameras will make it easier, faster, and more ergonomic for a community services officer to issue parking tickets in 1-hour, 2-hour, 4-hour, and other time-limited parking zones.

Instead of having to tap tires with chalk and return to see if the chalk mark is still there, parking enforcers will receive a prompt to write a citation. To be sure, the enforcer will still need to drive by vehicles more than once. But now, Keith said, “the system is going to be constantly processing those vehicles as it drives by.”

The cost of the system, including new hardware and software, will be $44,000 for the first year. Funding will come from a city vehicle abatement fund, and the new license plate readers will also be used to identify abandoned vehicles.

The cameras will be owned by the city but the software will not. The ongoing cost of renewing the software license to run the system will be around $6,000 to $7,000 a year. The Data Ticket system is also used by BART.

Keith said the new system will work well as part of a broader parking management plan for streets near BART stations that have time-limited parking except for residents who purchase permits.

He said the use of the new ticketing system could be paired with a revised parking permit program. Instead of permit holders getting stickers for their cars, enforcers can use license plates.

“We can create lists of vehicles that are excluded from enforcement,” Keith said.

“So I want you to think about our permit zones around BART stations," he said. "What this system allows us to do is that when somebody gets a parking permit for their neighborhood, the system can be set to ignore that license plate when it’s doing parking enforcement in that neighborhood. So we don’t need to see that (parking permit) sticker anymore.”

As of Jan. 15, the new system was not yet in use.