Governing Magazine/March 1995

FEATURE: FINES

PARKING FINES: JUST THE REVENUE TICKET?

The increasing reliance of some cities on fines to boost their income
is generating controversy in legal circles--and plenty of resentment
from the public.

By Laura Michaelis

Last March, the council in Metuchen, New Jersey, debated a familiar
subject: how the village might be able to increase its revenues
without raising property taxes. Then it made a controversial move. It
voted not to appoint James B. Smith to a third term on the municipal
bench.
 The move was controversial because Smith's problems weren't legal--
they were fiscal. According to a newspaper study, the Metuchen
courthouse had not been pulling in the kind of solid revenues in
parking tickets, court fines and traffic penalties that other
municipal courts in the state had been producing for their parent
cities. A judge with a better appreciation of the bottom line might be
able to help with the township's financial problems.
 In their zeal to increase revenue, however, Metuchen officials
sparked angry criticism from state legal experts concerned about the
ramifications of holding judges more accountable for revenue streams
than courtroom justice. "That reason is intolerable. It puts cash on
the scales of justice. It encourages what amounts to judicial
misconduct," came a rebuke by the state's chief justice, Robert N.
Wilentz.
 "This crass effort to influence judicial decisions is startling only
because it is so blatant," read the critical editorial in the New
Jersey Law Journal, the paper that had conducted the original study.
For his part, Smith says the council members' candor amazed him: "I
think they were trying to score points with the taxpayers and it
backfired," he says. "I just couldn't believe they would come out and
say it."
 While the Metuchen episode may seem rather extreme, the town is not
alone in taking controversial steps in the name of revenue collection.
To avoid levying new taxes, cities increasingly have to depend on
fines and penalties for much of the plus side of their balance sheets.
But as they have worked to maximize some of their most reliable
sources of income--parking tickets, court fines and traffic citations-
-cities are also provoking waves of citizen backlash and worrying some
experts about the integrity of running a city with the fines that the
local government itself levies.
 "Courts are not supposed to be run for the sake of making budgets,"
argues Steve Goldspiel of the American Bar Association. "We know that
all over the country traffic courts produce more revenue than they
cost. But we get a little nervous when people talk about how much
revenue they're going to get from the courts."

For many citizens, parking and traffic tickets are their only
interaction with the justice system. In some places, parking
adjudication is done through the local courthouse; in others, it is
handled by a separate parking department. Either way, though, parking
tickets can be important revenue producers for cities. And
increasingly, there is growing public resentment of that reliance.
 Just ask David Garrett. A resident of Washington, D.C., since the
late 1980s, he had only just arrived in the city when he had his first
encounter with a parking monitor. According to Garrett, he got his
first ticket at 2:30 a.m., as he was moving into his new apartment.
Rather than leave his television and computer in the car while he
carried boxes down the block to his apartment, Garrett says he double-
parked in front of his building and began hauling the items into the
lobby. A police officer soon arrived and told him he had to move his
car. After trying to explain the situation to the officer, he was
issued a $50 ticket.
 The next day, he parked near his apartment, in front of what had once
been a driveway but had been converted to a private garden. He got a
second $50 ticket that day. "The parking system here is more draconian
than any other city I've ever heard of," says Garrett, whose
experiences prompted him to start a citizens' group to lobby for less
punitive regulations. "It's one of the most absolutely imperialistic
parking systems in the country."
 But on the city ledgers, strict parking enforcement has paid off.
During 1993, facing an otherwise dire financial picture, the District
of Columbia issued approximately 1.9 million parking tickets and
collected $59 million in fines. Even in a $3 billion budget, that
amounts to more than just spare change.
 D.C.'s successful program has created some bitter enemies, however.
Several business groups have pushed the mayor to lighten up on
enforcement. At least one member of the city council has argued that
the city loses more than it gains from the omnipresent meter maids.
And more than 1,500 metro-area residents, many of whom can recount
Kafka-esque tales of run-ins with the city's parking enforcement
bureau, joined Garrett's organization, which recently published a book
on how to beat a parking ticket.
 "Parking tickets are supposed to be about keeping the streets safe,
providing for a free flow of traffic and turnover in the business
district," Garrett says. "Instead, it's become a revenue producer, and
the city pays no mind to other things that I consider important, like
sales taxes." Indeed, the statistics would seem to indicate that
safety concerns are not D.C.'s top priority. In 1992, for instance,
the city towed 14,256 vehicles from the streets but "booted" more than
28,000.
 The recognition that the revenue is extremely important has
consistently won out over public relations concerns. "With the
financial situation of the city today, it's not a matter of reducing,"
council member Harry Thomas Sr. told reporters last year after a city
council debate on parking meter rates. "We need every penny we can
get."
 Many localities have turned to the District as a model for how to
structure and enforce their parking regulations. For example, in the
early 1980s, when Massachusetts voters approved a property tax
limitation measure, Boston officials were forced to start looking
elsewhere to offset the loss of revenue. Among the steps the city took
was to bring in the same private company that Washington uses to
administer its parking enforcement. The result: Boston's parking fine
collections rose from $271,000 for fiscal 1981 to a projected $48
million for this fiscal year.
 While that accounts for only a small portion of the $1.4 billion
general fund, Sam Tyler, head of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau,
notes it is generally a highly reliable and cost-effective segment of
the budget. "Are parking tickets a revenue source or a safety issue?
There is no question that they are both," he says.
 In San Francisco, which issued 2.3 million parking citations for a
total of $43.9 million in fiscal 1993, city Supervisor Bill Maher
recently lost a close vote on his resolution that would have returned
the city's parking meters to a system that accepts nickels and dimes
as well as quarters, "so people wouldn't be reduced to panhandling on
the streets."
 "As in many cities," he adds, "we have a Department of Parking and
Traffic that does the enforcement as well as the adjudication. It's a
walking conflict of interest." Maher also argues that the system is
punitive and no longer revolves around safety concerns or business-
district turnover. "Unfortunately, we've become structurally dependent
on using the pretext of minor infractions to seize revenue from the
public," he says.
 Particularly bothersome to Maher is the practice of ticketing cars
when there is no pressing need to. He points to the fact that tickets
are regularly issued to cars parked in front of a bus zone even in the
middle of the night, when the city buses no longer run. "We've gone
from public safety and encouraging people to park correctly to
`gotcha.' The city is unwilling to retrench. We are increasingly
viewing the public as a revenue source, as suckers to be fleeced
instead of people to be served."
 The relative fines levied for parking infractions also reflect a
growing pressure to raise revenue. In general, violations such as
parking in front of a fire hydrant or in a handicapped parking space
carry hefty fines as a deterrent. But small increases in ticket fines
are regularly employed to raise money, not to discourage violators.

In addition to Garrett's group in Washington, there are other recent
examples of people fighting back. In Anchorage, Alaska, guerrilla
Samaritans traverse the city plugging quarters into soon-to-expire
meters. In New York City, commercial-vehicle owners have found parking
tickets to be such a drain on their operating expenses that they hire
special personnel to battle the details of the citations in court.
 And it's not just a big-city phenomenon. For years, the town of
Linndale, Ohio, with a population of 159, depended on speeding and
other traffic tickets issued on the two-tenths-of-a-mile strip of
Interstate 71 that runs through its boundaries to make up as much as
80 percent of its municipal budget. But after complaints reached the
legislature, the state law was changed to require jurisdiction over at
least a half-mile of highway in order to ticket motorists.
 One editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tracked the amount of
revenue that Georgia towns get from speeding tickets and urged the
state's General Assembly to consider legislation that would require
towns to turn over a portion of the fines from tickets that they issue
to the state.
 In any case, concern is growing that one casualty of municipalities'
increasing reliance on fines as a revenue source could be people's
faith in the justice system. "The municipal court has traditionally
been viewed as the arm of government that is closest to the people,"
notes Dennis Bliss, the assistant director of municipal court services
for New Jersey. If the public perceives that the municipal court is
unfair, Bliss says, "it's the beginning of the unraveling of the
public confidence in an important institution like the police
department."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 1995, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form
without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited.
Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of
Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
http://governing.com