Late fees on pre-2010 tickets will be waived for 6 months The District is going to give its 4 million parking and driving scofflaws who owe a collective $245.7 million a break.
Starting Monday and running through Jan. 27, the city will allow those with unpaid tickets to clear the decks by paying the original face value on the ticket. The city will forgive the fines that grow on top of the original fee when the ticket goes unpaid for 30 days. Officials say they hope to collect about $6.3 million through the amnesty program.
“This program is an incentive for customers to pay off their old tickets,” Mayor Vincent Gray said. “In the current economic environment, we expect that many customers will take advantage of this opportunity to clear their debts to the [Department of Motor Vehicles] at a lower cost.”
| Chatting about parking |
| The D.C. Department of Public Works answered a variety of questions from area drivers during a live chat on its website Wednesday. The questions ranged from complaints about parking problems from Adams Morgan residents to a question about the legality of parking a truck in your front yard (it’s a public space violation). The department said it hopes to make pay-by-phone available for all 17,000 public metered parking spaces by the end of August. ?– Betsey Woodruff |
The largest collection of unpaid parking tickets — nearly 38 percent — comes from cars with Maryland plates, officials said. About 23 percent of the unpaid tickets are from Virginia residents and a little more than 17 percent from D.C. cars. The rest are scattered across the country.
Those numbers make sense because the majority of parking tickets are issued to Maryland drivers, said District DMV Director Lucinda Babers. Asked why she thought that might be, Babers said, “because they illegally park in the District.”
The amnesty, though, isn’t just for parking tickets. It also includes tickets issued from speed and red-light cameras, and moving violation tickets issued by the police department. But the amnesty will only apply to tickets issued before Jan. 1, 2010, Babers said.
“We didn’t feel we needed to include anything after that … because we have an aggressive collection agency and that tends to get the more recent violations,” Babers said.
The D.C. Council, meanwhile, is considering a bill introduced by Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh that would empower the mayor to designate an office where he would centralize the debt collection process. Various agencies, including DMV, are charged with collecting debts but don’t always have enough manpower to keep up, a council committee report on the bill said.
A centralized office would “streamline” the process and “has the potential to help bring in revenue for the District that it should be collecting anyway,” the report said.
