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Monday, December 05, 2011

Ind. Courts - Fort Wayne problems collecting parking fines: talks of city court; duplicate license plate numbers

Updating this ILB entry from Dec. 23, 2010, headed "Fort Wayne officials decide not to pursue city court," Benjamin Lanka of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported yesterday as part of a lengthy story on the city's problems in collecting unpaid parking ticket fines:

One year ago, Kennedy and Mayor Tom Henry proposed creating a Fort Wayne city court. The idea was immediately panned by the county prosecutor and judiciary for being inefficient and unnecessary.

As quickly as it was proposed, a city court was withdrawn with promises of a better working relationship between the city and the county court system.

Promises, Kennedy said, were just “a bunch of talk.”

Just before Christmas last year, Deputy Mayor Beth Malloy said the city court proposal led to an increased interest by city and county officials to discuss how to better handle city ordinance violations. There were to be meetings conducted this year to discuss making the process better.

Those meetings never occurred.

Mike McAlexander, chief deputy prosecutor for the county, said Malloy was to contact his office to schedule those meetings.

“We never received a phone call or other invitation to further discuss the issue,” he said.

In fact, McAlexander said the prosecutor’s office never heard another complaint about issues since he sat with Malloy at that December news conference.

He said the court system does not handle parking tickets, as those are the city’s responsibility, and he believed the city court was proposed to help resolve issues surrounding other city violations.

City Attorney Carol Helton said the city is able to prosecute its cases on two afternoons a week in Allen Superior Court. With the high volume of cases in misdemeanor court – ranging from speeding tickets to smoking violations – Helton said it can be onerous on people looking to protest a parking ticket.

Instead of pursuing talks with the county, the city began using a new outside vendor to help collect unpaid parking tickets: T2 Systems, of Indianapolis.

The initial returns were good, Kennedy said, with a first mailing of notices by the company reaping about $60,000 in paid fines.

A second mailing, in April, produced problems.

People started calling from across the state questioning the notices, saying they had never been in Fort Wayne. Kennedy said her staff voicemail boxes were full of such complaints, although she noted most people had been fairly polite.

The problem was the company was requesting registration information based on only the license plate number, not the type. For years, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles issued identical license plate numbers for different plate types.

This means a passenger car could have the same number as a tractor-trailer rig or a municipally owned vehicle, according to Dennis Rosebrough, BMV spokesman.

This caused notices of unpaid tickets to be sent to the wrong people, Kennedy said, slowing collections. She thought the problem was fixed when another round of notices went out in November, but staff again returned to numerous complaint calls – some from the same people who called in the spring.

Rosebrough said the state decided to change the practice last year so that every plate, regardless of type, had a different combination of letters and numbers. He said the change was spurred by problems other states were having enforcing tickets from traffic or toll road cameras.

It will probably take until the end of 2013 for all the same-numbered plates to cycle through the system, however.

Kennedy said she is working with her vendor on the problem and why it occurred. Until it is fixed, she said the city is refraining from paying the vendor. According to the city’s online information portal, it made two payments to T2 this year: $320.35 in January and $150.64 in August.

Once the problem is fixed, Kennedy said she hopes to be able to send notices out each month in an effort to remind people to pay.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 5, 2011 10:07 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts