How did you start in the parking industry?
Women In Parking recently interviewed Dixon Resources Unlimited, Julie Dixon. She provides insight surrounding her professional journey and offers valuable advice to women in our industry.
When I was in college at UC Santa Barbara, I worked for the University Police Department as a community service officer. We did support and general campus security. At one point, my Lieutenant asked me to be the Parking Enforcement Officer in Isla Vista. The pay was great for the 80’s. I was hired by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department. This was a college town and I got to work side by side with the foot patrol officers and got great hands-on training. There were so many tickets that needed to be written and I learned discretion. I learned that the purpose of a parking ticket is to teach a lesson: educate them so that the mistakes are not made going forward. It was a unique position and I received a lot of flack for the job I did as a student writing tickets to my peers. Parking tickets went to traffic court – It was like Law and Order for parking tickets!
How and when did you decide to become further involved with parking?
In the early 90’s I returned to the UCSB CSO program and expanded the program to include parking enforcement services.Through 1998, I trained and worked with 50 student employees each year in the community service program. I then started to explore other opportunities when my students came back to visit me. They were making a lot more money than me and I realized it was time to solicit other opportunities. I left Santa Barbara to work for a company and helped to expand the use of automated enforcement systems (red light cameras) throughout the North American market and became a recognized industry subject matter expert. In 2006, Serco Inc. began recruiting me to expand their interest in bringing the red light cameras into the United States. As I was considering the opportunity, they asked me about my parking knowledge. Serco moved me from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I moved into the San Francisco parking meter counting and collections operation. My exposure to parking meters had been limited until then. It’s funny, you never really thought about how parking meters were collected. From that moment, I lived, slept and breathed the parking meter operation in San Francisco.
