City Council member Bill Gulliford asked an innocent enough question Monday morning to a room full of people who had pension reform on their mind.
That plan would be announced an hour later, but Gulliford wanted to briefly talk parking tickets.
Mayor Lenny Curry’s administration had decided to write off unpaid parking tickets over a 30-year span.
“Anybody want to know what the total dollar amount is?” said the finance committee chair at the end of the meeting.
No one quickly responded, so he offered the answer in the form of another question.
“How about $11 million?”
That got the room’s attention. A quick but audible gasp, a brief whistle.
According to ordinance, the city is able to simply cut its losses on fines that were never paid. The city is allowed to remove debts more than a year old. However, it pursues them for five years.
City Chief Financial Officer Mike Weinstein sent a memo to council President Greg Anderson, Council Auditor Kirk Sherman and Gulliford in December informing them of his decision to write off the uncollectable citations.
Weinstein told the committee during its meeting that signing off on such settlements and waivers is the “most painful part of my job.”
“We do give away a lot of money,” he said.
From 1980-2010, there were 191,500 parking citations that never were paid. The highest annual unpaid fines came at more than $1 million from 2005-09.
Illegally parking in a handicapped spot earns a $250 fine. Overtime on a meter starts at $15 and the fees jump as as both continue to go unpaid. After a certain period, a boot can be hitched to the offender’s car.
Still, Gulliford said, it’s not enough “incentive” to keep people paying their fines. He’d like to see the state provide assistance when it comes time to vehicle and license renewal time. Paying parking citations would happen before any renewal.
Weinstein suggested during the meeting that increasing the “incentive” — the punishment, actually — for people to pay or potentially bidding out the Request for Proposal with a debt collection company could be ways.
Currently, there’s not much he or the city can do.
“We don’t have debtors prisons,” Weinstein quipped to council members.
Questions about the city’s arrangement with its debt collection agency, Penn Credit Corp., were not answered by Curry’s office.
Council member Matt Schellenberg serves as the liaison to the National League of Cities and Florida Association of Counties. He’s asked members of both organizations how they handle the issue and only has received a few answers — Tallahassee has a system in place and “does a very good job collecting fines,” he said, but needs to find out details.
Others will respond, said Schellenberg, then it’s a matter of finding out what they do well and trying to find a solution for Jacksonville.
In the meantime, he’s bullish about enforcing laws on the books — fines amassed should be collected.
“We expect citizens to follow the rules,” he said. “Most people get it … but for those who ignore the law, we need to be more aggressive.”
For now, though, it’ll just be money billed but lost — after more than two decades on some, they’re considered non-collectible.
To keep the books properly balanced, that means making them disappear.
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