Pasadena’s Parking Enforcement Gamble: Why Bringing Inter-Con In-House Could Cost More Than It Saves

For the past several years, Pasadena’s streets have been patrolled by a mix of city employees and workers from Inter-Con Security Systems, a private contractor that has handled the bulk of parking enforcement since 2020. That arrangement is now in question. The City Council recently approved a one-year extension of the Inter-Con contract — adding $696,000 and pushing the five-year deal’s total value past $7.2 million — while the Department of Transportation quietly studies whether to pull enforcement entirely in-house.

On paper, the logic is easy to follow. Why pay a private firm a markup on every parking control officer when the city could hire its own staff and keep the difference? Pasadena has already been moving in that direction: in 2024 the Council more than doubled its in-house enforcement team, from four full-time officers to ten, largely to cover the expanded Playhouse District meter zone. The current evaluation asks whether that expansion should become the whole program.

But a look at how other cities — including Pasadena’s closest neighbors — have handled this exact decision suggests the math is a lot less favorable than it looks from the dais.

The case against going fully in-house

The cautionary tale doesn’t have to be imported from out of state. Just down the freeway, the City of Los Angeles runs its parking enforcement operation entirely in-house through LADOT, and the results have been rough. Reporting this year found that Los Angeles has lost more than $315 million over the past decade running its own enforcement program, with staffing, overtime, liability claims, and citation-processing costs consistently outpacing what the fines bring in. Ticket issuance has fallen as the city has struggled to keep enforcement positions filled, and LA is now leaning on automated bus-lane cameras rather than a larger human workforce to close the gap, even as LADOT’s budget keeps growing.

That pattern — a public enforcement workforce that’s expensive to staff, hard to retain, and slow to generate offsetting revenue — is the exact set of problems a private contractor is built to absorb instead of the city. Contractors carry their own vehicles, uniforms, hiring pipelines, and liability coverage, and they can scale staffing up or down without going through a civil service hiring process or a union negotiation every time. When a city takes that function in-house, it typically inherits pension and benefit obligations, overtime exposure, recruitment costs, workers’ comp liability, and — as Los Angeles has found — a structural gap between what enforcement costs and what it collects.

Pasadena’s own staff report on the Inter-Con extension flags a version of this problem already: before the city can even shift contracted duties to city employees, it has to negotiate with its own employee union, since the work “mirrors jobs the city’s own officers perform.” That’s not a minor procedural footnote — it’s the same friction point that has slowed or reversed similar transitions elsewhere.

Burbank went the opposite direction

If Pasadena wants a real-world preview of what happens when a city tries to run parking enforcement entirely with its own staff, Burbank already ran that experiment — and abandoned it.

For years, Burbank Police handled parking enforcement in-house. By 2022, the department had only six parking enforcement employees, its patrol vehicles were years past their expected service life, and the city was struggling to recruit and retain a stable, trained workforce. The City Council’s response wasn’t to hire more city employees — it was to bring in a third-party contractor. In 2023, Burbank selected LAZ Parking, a national firm with decades of parking enforcement experience in cities like West Hollywood, Long Beach, and Manhattan Beach, to handle the majority of enforcement duties (roughly 75–90%) alongside a smaller core of remaining city staff.

In other words, Burbank moved from an in-house model to a hybrid contracted model for the same reasons Pasadena’s Inter-Con arrangement exists in the first place: recruitment is hard, turnover is constant, and a specialized outside vendor can absorb that churn more easily than a city HR department can.

Glendale’s hybrid model has held steady since 2017

Glendale offers the clearest long-term case study, because it went through this exact decision-making process nearly a decade ago and has stuck with the outcome.

In 2017, a consultant review of Glendale’s parking program (conducted by Walker Consultants) identified a fragmented, under-resourced operation and recommended outsourcing a significant share of enforcement duties rather than trying to build out a fully in-house team. The city adopted a balanced model: the Glendale Police Department kept its full-time parking enforcement officers in supervisory and specialized roles, while contracted staff — up to sixteen full-time contracted officers, plus supervisors and dispatchers — handled the bulk of day-to-day citation issuance. The council even had to amend the municipal code to allow a private contractor to enforce parking laws at all.

Nearly ten years later, that structure is still in place. Glendale’s contracted officers use city-branded, clearly marked vehicles equipped with license-plate recognition technology, while city police retain oversight, minor collision reporting, and specialized enforcement functions. It’s a model built explicitly to combine the accountability of city oversight with the staffing flexibility of a contractor — the same trade-off Pasadena is currently trying to solve for.

What this means for Pasadena

Laid side by side, the pattern among Pasadena’s neighbors is consistent, and it points the opposite direction from where Pasadena’s staff evaluation seems headed:

City	Model	Trajectory
Pasadena	Hybrid (city staff + Inter-Con contract since 2020)	Evaluating a shift to fully in-house
Burbank	Fully in-house until 2022–23	Moved to a contractor (LAZ Parking) after staffing failures
Glendale	Hybrid since 2017 restructuring	Has stayed hybrid for nearly a decade
Los Angeles	Fully in-house (LADOT)	Over $315M in losses over 10 years; now leaning on automated enforcement

No neighboring city has successfully run a fully in-house parking enforcement program without running into the staffing and cost problems Pasadena is presumably trying to solve by considering the switch. Burbank tried the in-house route and moved away from it. Glendale evaluated the same options Pasadena is evaluating now and settled on a hybrid model it has kept for eight years. And Los Angeles — the region’s largest fully in-house operation — has become something of a textbook example of how enforcement costs can outrun citation revenue once you’re carrying the full weight of staffing, benefits, and liability internally.

None of this means Pasadena’s Department of Transportation shouldn’t keep expanding its own core team, the way it did in 2024. A strong in-house supervisory and specialized-enforcement staff, paired with contracted labor for routine patrol and citation issuance, is exactly the model Glendale has run successfully. But a full transition away from Inter-Con — without a very clear plan for staffing, retention, and the union negotiation the city’s own report says is required — risks trading a predictable, budgeted contract line for the kind of open-ended cost growth Los Angeles has spent the last decade trying to climb out of.

The Department of Transportation says no timeline for a transition has been set. Given what’s happened in Burbank, Glendale, and Los Angeles, that caution seems well placed.

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Sources: Pasadena Now, City of Pasadena Department of Transportation, City of Burbank / myBurbank, City of Glendale council staff reports, Westside Current.