Iowa lawmakers want to curb handicapped parking abuse

A pair of Iowa lawmakers are taking an alternate route to reining in abuse of handicap parking permits.

Rep. Dave Tjepkes, R-Gowrie, and Jim Lykam, D-Davenport, had proposed House File 79 requiring all the permits to be renewed. However, they discovered approximately 465,000 handicap parking permits have been issued to 272,000 Iowans – nearly 9 percent of the state's population.

Just notifying the permit holders they had to renew the parking passes would have cost the Iowa Department of Transportation more than $100,000, according to Elizabeth Baird, a department lobbyist.

And the paperwork required to process nearly a half million permit renewals would have paralyzed the DOT, Lykam and Tjepkes said.

Tjepkes and Lykam said they began looking into the situation because they hear complaints from disabled Iowans as well as the general public about people abusing the parking permits. Baird said the department gets a few complaints a month.

One of those who has complained is Ron Koehn of Marion, who wife uses a wheelchair. Frequently, there are no handicap parking spaces available, he said, so they either drive around looking for one farther from their destination of they have to park in a typical parking space. Maneuvering a wheelchair in and out of a vehicle in a typical parking spot is difficult.

“It's a problem for people who truly need the handicap parking space,” Koehn said. “If all these places are taken by people who really don't need them, we end up parking farther away.

“At the least it's inconvenient and at most it's disgusting that I would have to do that,” Koehn said.

So, Lykam and Tjepkes, the chairman and ranking member of the House Transportation Committee, are drafting an amendment to be introduced March 2 that would start the process in January 2012. Parking permits would be issued for five years. About 36,000 permits are issued each year, they said.

Baird said the DOT is considering adding the parking permits to a driver's license database so police officers could easily determine if parking permits were valid. With everything else they do, that's a low priority for law enforcement, she said.

Now, once a permit is issued, it remains in force forever. There is no follow-up to see if the recipient continues to need the permit. For example, Lykam said his later mother had a parking permit and he could have continued to use it after her death. He cut it up, he said.