Politics & Government

Pay Your Oakland and Berkeley Parking Tickets — or Get the Boot?

A plan to partner with the City of Berkeley on a parking ticket scofflaw program could bring the City of Oakland a $2.5 million windfall.

 A proposal to partner with the City of Berkeley on a parking ticket scofflaw program could bring the City of Oakland an estimated $2.5 million windfall in fiscal year 2014-15, a city official says.

The program calls for both cities to contract with the same "booting" company, which would use license plate reader technology to locate vehicles with a total of five or more unpaid parking tickets from Berkeley, Oakland or a combination of both cities.

When the overdue tickets are paid — the only sure way to have a parking "boot" removed — any monies owed to either city would be distributed appropriately. 

It's estimated that the plan could bring in $2.5 million for Oakland alone in 2014-15, the first year the program would go into effect, David McPherson, Oakland's  revenue and tax administrator, said in a phone interview Tuesday.

That estimate was revised upward from $2 million after reviewing the results of the most recent field test conducted by the city's present booting contractor, Paylock IPT LLC. 

Because the program is expected to catch many long-time scofflaws in its first year, revenues in future years would likely be considerably less than $2.5 million — but still worth pursuing, McPherson said.

"There's always a new batch," he said.

Oakland already has a program that allows people with five or more unpaid Oakland parking citations to unlock a tire boot themselves if they pay their fines (and a $140 processing fee that goes to the booting company) immediately by credit card or check via a 24-hour hotline. Once the fines are paid, the violator receives a code to input on a keypad attached to the boot, unlocking it. That program would continue.

What's new about the current proposal is the cooperation between two cities, McPherson said. The threshold for applying a boot would be five unpaid parking tickets from Berkeley and Oakland combined, rather than from a single city.

McPherson said the Oakland-Berkeley program would be the first of its kind in California.

Three cities in the Los Angeles area have a similar program, but while they use unpaid citations from all three cities to meet the five-ticket threshold, they collect fines only for the city where the vehicle is located and booted, he said. 

Two field tests by Paylock earlier this year identified 2,961 scofflaw vehicles, McPherson said in a memo on the proposal prepared for the Oakland City Council this week. That's 20 percent of the outstanding unpaid citations.

The plan is included as part of Oakland's proposed two-year city budget. Once the budget is approved by the city council later this month, Oakland can move ahead on details of the two-city plan, McPherson said.


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