Oops! City Overcharged On 7,000 Parking Tickets

For 15 months, the city has been mistakenly — and illegally — overcharging people for some parking violations, taking in $180,000 in fines that it should never have collected.

The city discovered the error last week and will be issuing rebates to the people that were overcharged, said Jim Travers, the city’s transportation chief.

Travers said the city doesn’t yet know exactly how many people were affected by the ​“clerical error.” He estimated about 7,000 tickets were issued with $50 fines, which should have been $30 each.

“We recognize our error,” Travers said. ​“We take full responsibility.”

In a Friday afternoon press conference, Travers explained the mess-up:

Almost two years ago, when the city was crafting the annual budget for fiscal year 2012 – 13, the transportation department proposed raising the fines for nine traffic violations from $30 to $50. Travers saw the violations — offenses like parking the wrong way on a one way street, and parking in a crosswalk — as threats to public safety that should warrant an appropriately steep fine.

Travers worked with the Office of Management and Budget and wrote a draft budget based on the fines going up. But when it came time to submit the budget to the Board of Aldermen, ​“this piece of paper didn’t get submitted,” Travers said, holding up the sheet with the fine increases.

When 2012 – 13 fiscal year began on July 1, 2012, the transportation department began charging $50 for the nine violations. But the law on the books still said they should be charging only $30.

For 15 months, that fact went undiscovered, until last week, when a sharp-eyed driver looked up the law and spotted the discrepancy. Since then, Travers said, he has made sure his staff begin fining people $30, not $50, for the nine violations. And he has ordered an analysis of all the tickets issued, to find out how much the city collected in error.

He estimated the city collected about $180,000 that it shouldn’t have. He said the city will refund all of that money to the people who were wrongly overcharged. ​“We will proactively issue a rebate.”

People affected by the error will get a check from the city accompanied by a letter of explanation, Travers said.

The tickets were not erroneously written, Travers said. ​“These were valid tickets issued.” They just asked people to pay more than they should have.

Travers estimated that the city collected $150,000 in error in fiscal year 2012 – 2013, and $30,000 in error in fiscal year 2013 – 2014, which began on July 1. The city will also miss out on an additional estimated $120,000 in projected revenue for the current fiscal year, since the traffic enforcement officers will be issuing $30 tickets instead of $50 tickets from now on.

The city can make up the difference through an expected boom in parking meter revenue, Travers said. ​“I’d much rather have people pay for parking than issue a parking ticket.”

Travers said the city’s recently introduced pay-by-cell phone parking program is taking off. ParkMobile, the company that the city hired to install and run the system, said New Haven’s use of the service is growing faster than any other city the company works with, Travers said.

Travers said he may again move to have the traffic violation fines raised to $50, but not until the next fiscal year.

The nine parking violations for which $50 tickets were erroneously issues are:

Parking the wrong way on a one-way street, obstructing traffic, within 25 feet of a corner, within 25 feet of a stop sign, within 25 feet of a crosswalk, in a safety zone, in a bus stop, in a crosswalk, or in a no-standing area.