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Updated
February 21, 2012
Albany cashes in as parking tickets fall
Better collection efforts bring in nearly $1M more despite fewer tickets
by JORDAN CARLEO-EVANGELIST Staff writer
Published in the Times Union, 12:00 a.m., Tuesday, October 19, 2010
ALBANY -- A year after a parking-ticket scandal roiled City Hall, Albany has collected nearly $1 million more in parking fines and surcharges so far this year -- despite the fact that its parking enforcement officers are writing fewer tickets, Treasurer Kathy Sheehan said.
The numbers may underscore the inefficiencies that pervaded the city's old fine-collection system -- problems that were laid bare in a series of unprecedented Common Council hearings last summer.
State auditors found the city's tracking of parking violations so murky in some instances that they couldn't say for sure how much money Albany lost out on by doling out unregulated free parking privileges for years.
Overall, collections were up 36 percent, or $915,540, through Sept. 30 of this year, Sheehan told city lawmakers during a Monday night hearing on her office's proposed 2011 budget.
For city coffers, that's meant about $715,000 more in revenue when you subtract the 7.5 percent that Albany yields to Complus Data Innovations, the company that provided the new software and equipment.
"It's the benefit of having a 21st-century computer system," said Sheehan, who took office in January and immediately oversaw the implementations of the changes. The process began under her predecessor, Betty Barnette.
But the bump in collections belies two other trends: The city's public service officers, or PSOs, are ticketing fewer cars and the total value of those violations that are written has plummeted.
Through July, the total number of tickets written was down about 4,000, or seven percent over last year, and the total dollar value of those tickets was down 27 percent, Sheehan said.
Sheehan said the drop in ticket writing is an enforcement issue that she has discussed with police Chief Steven Krokoff, whose department oversees the public service officers.
"I can only collect what's written," Sheehan said.
Councilman Daniel Herring speculated that it might be linked, at least in part, to the state moving more workers from downtown offices to the Harriman State Office Campus.
The trend seems to contradict one of the perceived benefits of the new system: That PSOs might actually become more productive because their new hand-held computers would require them to rely less on more time-consuming hand-written tickets.
The city expects to collect about $3.6 million in fines and surcharges next year, up nearly $350,000 from what it collected in 2009 -- the first full year after the Times Union revealed that thousands of tickets were being inappropriately issued with no fines whatsoever.