While there are certainly worse things in life, the moment you return to your car parked on the street and find a parking citation slapped under the windshield washer, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything worse.

You’re five minutes over the allotted time, or accidentally parked where you’re supposed to have a neighborhood permit, or it’s an alternate Tuesday — whatever — and all of a sudden you owe the city $65? More than you just paid for dinner and a movie, and for ... nothing? You’re understandably really ticked off.

But what if you were to find that the city of Los Angeles actually spends $65 million more of your taxpayer money on paying for its meter maids — and meter dudes — than it gets in fines paid by motorists?

That, in other words, Angelenos get it coming and going? They have to pay those parking fines, and then pay way more than that in salaries and benefits for the city employees who write the tickets?

That’s outrageous. And it’s also not a simple situation.

As a study released this month by the innovative hyperlocal news site Crosstown — motto, “LA by the Numbers” — shows, in 2024 parking-ticket revenue was about $110 million. But it cost about $176 million in pay and benefits to pay the employees of the parking enforcement division. A net loss has actually been the case since 2016. But recent pay hikes for workers, and, ironically, fewer tickets being written — 21% fewer than in 2016 — have widened the gap between expenses and income.

COVID-era changes worsened the problem. Many parking regulations were suspended in 2020 and 2021, leading to a 37% drop in revenue from tickets. So that’s a problem. But a different problem than others in government. It’s not as if Angelenos are going to march on City Hall demanding that more parking tickets be written.

But it’s a serious issue: “City Controller Kenneth Mejia cited declining parking revenue as among the factors contributing to what he estimates will be a $140 million revenue shortfall in Los Angeles’s budget,” Crosstown reports.

We don’t want a huge upswing in tickets. We do want to see fiscal responsibility. But ironies abound here, as recent budget belt-tightening means fewer people are being hired in parking enforcement. Solutions will not be fast or simple.