Thomas Breen photo
The city plans to increase the fine for the most common type of parking ticket by $5, with the hope of raising at least $300,000 in additional annual revenue for strapped municipal coffers.
That announcement came during the latest Finance Committee workshop on the mayor’s proposed $547.1 million operating budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1. The workshop was held last week in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
Presenting at the tail end of a five-and-a-half hour workshop, Traffic, Transit & Parking (TTP) Director Doug Hausladen told alders that the biggest changes to his department’s proposed budget relate to new revenues, not to new expenditures or new cuts.
City Transit Director Doug Hausladen.
Hausladen said his department proposes to increase the fines for Group 1 parking tickets from $20 to $25. He said this increase should conservatively bring an additional $300,000 to $500,000 in revenue each year to city coffers.
“The Group 1 parking tickets are the lowest level tickets in our city,” Hausladen explained. “They are also the most common.”
Group 1 tickets are given out to people who don’t pay the parking meter, or who stay in their parking spot for longer than they’ve paid for. They also apply to drivers who park too far from the curb, and to those who stay in a parking spot for longer than 72 hours.
Hausladen also said the city plans to increase the fine for commercial vehicles (e.g. tractor trailers) parked in residential areas from $20 to $100. He admitted this violation doesn’t happen frequently. But when it does, it is a major inconvenience, eyesore, and potential hazard to neighbors.
Group 1 parking violations, on the other hand, happen all the time.
Last fiscal year, Hausladen’s department gave out 139,730 tickets in total. These tickets spanned the five broad groups of parking violations, ranging from obstructing a driveway to parking in a handicapped zone. The city collected just over $4.6 million in parking tag revenue last year.
Of those 139,730 tickets, around 100,000 were for Group 1 violations. The proposed budget’s recommended parking ticket increases project that parking tag revenue will increase from the $4.5 million budgeted for the current fiscal year to $4.8 million next year. Hausladen said that, considering that the city gives out around 100,000 Group 1 tickets each year, an increase of only $300,000 is a conservative estimate.
The proposed budget also identifies a $200,000 projected increase in street meter receipts, from $6.8 million this year to $7 million next year.
There are 2,992 metered parking spaces in the city, according to a TTP departmental summary provided by Hausladen at the workshop. That document also says that all city parking meters now accept payment through the Parkmobile smartphone app, and that nearly 2,000 accept on-site credit card payments.
Making Money Off Mistakes?
Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison.
The alders on the Finance Committee have spent the past month and a half scouring the proposed budget for source of revenue that may ward off a proposed 11 percent tax increase. At least one alder was skeptical of Hausladen’s suggestion that the city raise more money from parking tickets.
“I don’t believe in making money off of people for their mistakes,” said Dixwell Alder and Acting Mayor Jeanette Morrison.
She wagered that most people who receive parking tickets delay on paying them for longer than two weeks, which is when the fines double from $20 to $40. She said that the proposed increase from $20 to $25 for Group 1 tickets would practically mean a proposed increase from $40 to $50 for most residents who procrastinate on their payments.
“I just don’t think it’s fair to put that on residents,” she said.
Hausladen retorted that most Group 1 recipients do indeed pay their fines on time within the $20 window. After the meeting, he followed up with the Independent to say that around 50 percent of Group 1 fine recipients pay within two weeks.
He also said that New Haven parking enforcement officers leave physical tickets on car windshields so that alleged parking offenders know exactly when, why and where they are being fined.
“We’re not Bridgeport,” he said. “We don’t mail you a ticket.”
After the meeting, Hausladen told the Independent that we currently live in a “Golden Age of Parking,” as it has never been so easy for drivers to pay for metered parking spots just as it has never been so easy for cities to issue and collect on parking violations.
“This should create the highest value for parking operations and highest satisfaction for customers,” he wrote to the Independent.
Cities should take advantage of this moment, Hausladen wrote, as a future draws near in which driverless cars that automatically pick up and drop off commuters completely eliminate the need for on-street parking, along with any municipal revenue that comes with it.
“If Autonomous Vehicles take hold,” he wrote, “we would then reach peak parking, where the value of parking will begin to drop rapidly … ultimately causing major overhauls in the parking industry and hopefully a large boom in construction to retrofit and reuse properties previously available for parking operations. It’s imperative now to think through in design future retrofits, which make projects slightly harder and more expensive to construct but have a longer return on capital.”
The Board of Alders must approve a final version of the budget by the first week of June.
The next budget workshop, during which the Finance Committee will interview department heads about their respective allocations in the mayor’s proposed budget, is on Thursday, April 19, at 6 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
$300K may sound like a lot but, in perspective, it is less than one tenth of one percent of the budget. Equivalent to telling someone who makes $20.00 an hour that they will now make $20.01 an hour. Nice, I suppose, but if we don't address the wasteful spending, we'll never make real progress.