SWAMPSCOTT — Town officials are considering a sweeping overhaul of Swampscott’s parking rules after concluding the current system has become confusing, inconsistent, and difficult to enforce.

Police Chief Ruben Quesada attended a recent Select Board meeting, and reported that officers have issued 576 parking citations during the first six months of the year, putting the town on pace to surpass its recent annual average of about 860 citations. 

Quesada said that the commuter rail station generated the most tickets with 105, followed by Humphrey Street with 58 and Vinnin Square with 48. 

During his presentation, Quesada noted that years of changes have left the town with a parking system that is sometimes difficult for both residents and officers to navigate.

“It took me probably a couple years to figure this out,” Quesada said. “On Columbia Street near the depot on the even side is resident only, but on the odd side it’s a recreation sticker or a town sticker.” 

Quesada suggested that parking enforcement in town could be improved by clearer guidelines that are easier for both residents and officers to understand. 

“We completely understand why that is because it’s affecting our residents in that area of town,” he said. “But there’s also things that we should probably start looking at if there’s other ways of conducting parking enforcement and regulations.” 

Among the ideas discussed were creating neighborhood parking zones with color-coded resident permits, renewing permits annually, standardizing parking fines across town, creating an online map of parking restrictions, and using improved data collection to guide enforcement decisions.

Town Administrator Nick Connors said that the town would need to coordinate with police, fire, public works, and other departments before any concrete details of such plans could be put in place.

“We need the professional staff that are closest to it… making sure that we come back to you with well-informed recommendations,” Connors said. “This would be the type of thing where we would benefit from professional staff getting together so it’s not driven by a neighborhood that’s really highly impacted for a period of time being the squeaky wheel … and we don’t think about how it impacts the other parts of the community.”

The board also discussed parking fines, with some members expressing confusion that many violations still carry $25 penalties despite previous efforts to increase fines in some areas.

Select Board member Ted Dooley suggested the town distinguish between routine parking violations and those that create public safety hazards.

“There were really two types of tickets,” he said. “There’s public safety tickets, and there’s what I’m going to call annoyance tickets… The fact that we have a $25 ticket for the fire lanes… I would encourage us to look at a model of there’s two tiers of tickets. Somebody in a fire lane should not be charged $25.”

Select Board Chair Katie Phelan said the town originally raised parking fines at some beaches because drivers had begun treating citations as the cost of parking.

“People were just like, ‘Oh, $25 to park here for the day. This is cheaper than any other neighboring beach, so we’ll just take the ticket,’” Phelan said. “That is why they became $75, because then $75 became prohibitive instead of a parking fee.”

The board said they would return to a future meeting with recommendations from town staff on standardizing parking fines and developing options for a townwide parking system that could include neighborhood parking zones, better marked parking spaces in high-demand areas, and potentially using additional technology to improve parking management and enforcement.