SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- It just got a little harder to dodge your parking tickets in Syracuse.
The city on Tuesday added 10,000 vehicles to its list of parking scofflaws by using a bit of database craftwork.
Here's the deal:
Parking tickets are registered to a license plate - that's how the city tracks who owes money and how much. That plate is registered to a vehicle with the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
In the past, if you were to get a new license plate, your tickets would stick with the old one. The city, then, would have no way to link your vehicle to your past parking violations if you got new plates.
Some people get new plates when they re-register a vehicle in a new state (think college students) and some get new plates if they change their name (like a newlywed). Others, however, swap plates once parking tickets start to pile up.
The city's most effective way to collect outstanding parking debts from scofflaws is with boots. A vehicle is boot eligible if it has three or more tickets past 90 days old or if the city has filed a judgment for parking violations.
Until now, a driver could make tickets vanish and avoid a boot by getting a new license plate, which costs around $30. That's a pretty good trade-off considering most parking violations cost $30 or more.
Recognizing this, city officials in the parking violations bureau -- led by Deputy Commissioner Peggy Finch and Collections Supervisor Rosemary Lepiane -- did some cross referencing to better track scofflaws with multiple tickets on past plates. They cross-referenced names and dates of birth with DMV data on current and historic plate numbers. They paired that with their own list of outstanding violations.
What they found was people with hundreds of outstanding tickets to their name on old license plates. They determined 10,000 more vehicles than previously known are boot eligible. The fines on those vehicles add up to about $2 million.
Boot Bump
Since the city merged those databases Tuesday, it's been booting between 20 and 30 cars a day, according to Finch. Before that, workers might boot eight to 10 cars on a typical day.
The new pace is so fast the city had to call PayLock, which operates the boots, and ask for more.
As Finch and Lepiane spoke with reporters outside their City Hall office Friday morning, a man walked in carrying a boot -- one of those 20-30 people Finch was talking about.
This is a boot. It can be unlocked remotely.
With the addition of the 10,000 new boot-eligible plates, the city is owed a total of $9 million for parking violations. Some of that dates back years and will likely never be collected. But the boots have provided a way to collect more payments.
Last year, the city took in about $600,000 from booted cars. The biggest single payment in recent years was somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000, Lepiane said. The city just booted a car with a judgment for more than $10,000.
Have you been booted? Contact the Parking Violations Bureau at (315) 479-5300 to determine if you are eligible to enter into a payment plan to repay tickets owed. You can pay outstanding tickets online, by phone at (800) 394-3478 or by mail to "Parking Violations Bureau" P.O. Box 5211, Dept. 116019, Binghamton, N.Y. 13902-5211.