For $65,000, City Says it Settles Parking Ticket Suit

City officials say they have agreed to pay $65,000 to settle a class action lawsuit filed against it last year over parking ticket appeals.

The Santa Monica couple who filed the suit, Harriet and Stanley Epstein, accused the city and the contractor that processes its parking citations of not complying with the California Vehicle Code, which requires agencies to explain why a ticket won't be overturned.

In addition to reimbursement for attorney fees, the Epsteins sought to force the city to provide written explanations to thousands of motorists who contested parking tickets after that section of the vehicle code was adopted in January 2009.

Under a settlement approved Tuesday night by the City Council in a 7-0 vote, the city will mail about 11,500 such notifications.

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The Epsteins say there are more details to be hashed out before a settlement is actually reached.

"There is no settlement at this point," Stanley Epstein wrote in an email. "Although the parties have been negotiating for four months, several important  points remain to be worked out before  completion. If and when  the parties resolve all outstanding issues, the settlement document must be approved by  a  Superior Court judge."

The bulk of the letters will be sent to motorists who only took the first step toward an appeal: asking for a review of the citation. A smaller portion of the letters, about 2,500, will be delivered to alleged violators, who after receiving the initial review, sought and lost an administrative hearing, according to the city attorney.

In those cases, the alleged violators received form letters that provided little to no justification for losing their appeals, the Epsteins alleged in court documents.

Because of the settlement, those motorists will now have the opportunity to request new hearings.

Harriet Epstein said she was cited Feb. 2, 2011 after parking her car for five minutes near . The ticket was for $65.

"The sign [said] 'parking for Euclid Park patrons only' and ambiguously fails to specify how long a patron has to use the park," she wrote in a letter to the city the week after she was cited.

City Attorney Marcia Jones Moutrie said between the time the state's vehicle code was amended to require a hearing "examiner's decision...[to] include a written reason for denial" and the time the Epsteins sued, the city had already stopped its practice of issuing form letters.

Also under the settlement, the contractor ACS State & Local Solutions, Inc. will shell out an additional $12,500.

Earlier this month, the Santa Monica Daily Press reported that the Epsteins estimated a trial would have cost upwards of $1 million, not including attorney fees.

It is the second lawsuit city officials settled in the past week.

On Monday, Moutrie announced that the city was dropping the criminal charges it had brought against Santa Monica-based Goldline International, Inc., which it accused of "bait and switch" transactions. In that case, .

This story was updated at 9:30 a.m. with information provided by Stanley Epstein.