Since the news first broke that an agent had issued fake parking citations to area motorists, the Department of Transportation’s parking enforcement division has been under increased scrutiny.

T.J. Bathras, deputy of the safety division and one of the managers responsible for making sure parking citations are accurate, explains the changes the department has implemented to prevent unwarranted parking tickets in the future.

What changes in procedures have you made to prevent agents from issuing unwarranted tickets to motorists?

One of the things we’ve trained our agents to do with the new hand-held devices, or PDAs, is to take pictures of the violation, which we can then use to verify the citation. That is part of our standard procedure.