So I got a letter a couple of months ago from the city of Cleveland saying that my parking ticket was late. I had, a couple of months before that, gotten a parking ticket because my class ran late and my meter expired (by less than 5 minutes–arg!) when I got back to my car. I paid this ticket online. I forgot about the letter because I assumed it was a mistake–their web system and their collections people not in sync or something–and I was really busy with school at the time. (I had meant to check on it, but I literally forgot.)
Anyway, I got another letter a month ago saying that because I hadn’t paid the ticket, I now had a bunch of late fees and stuff and it was $60. It listed the ticket number, and I looked back in my records and the ticket number is not the same as the one I paid. I wrote them a letter saying I had paid the ticket I got and didn’t know what the ticket they were talking about was. They just sent me a letter back with a copy of the ticket. Apparently it was issued at 9:20 in the morning for parking at a meter that didn’t allow parking until 9:30. I never got that ticket.
If it was me, I’d pay the current fine and fees and stuff, before it got any worse, and forget about it. I probably wouldn’t have ignored the first letter (but I might easily have lost it and ended up in the same situation). Unless there’s an easy way to prove you were in Rio de Janeiro on the date in question.
But that’s just me. My parents used to chant “pay the $2” when I was a kid. They meant sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re right, just give the government the money and get them to go away.
I don’t mind paying the original ticket, it’s the fines that I’m miffed about. (By the way the original letter had the fines already, it’s not like I could have avoided this all by responding back then. It’s just that this letter is from collections whereas that one was just a notice.)
And to further clarify, my initial reaction to the first letter was “wtf? this must be a mistake” but I totally meant to deal with it. I even tried calling them but could not get through to a person. I set the letter aside on my desk to get around to later and then got caught up in school and life and totally forgot about it. (I did dig it out from under all of the other piled up papers on my desk when I got the other letter.)
ETA: I’m basically wondering about the chances of what lobotomyboy63 is suggesting.
If you are correct that they have a lot of billing issues, maybe they hear the complaint all the time. And, things do get lost in the mail after all. Plus, you can show that you responsibly paid a different ticket—so you the jolly roger flying from your car antenna is misleading and subject to prejudice.
ETA how much arrrrrrh the fines and how much was the ticket? Arrrrh they charging $50 on a $10 ticket?
So at least half of the total is fines…seems steep. I wonder if you’d have to go to traffic court to argue it.
As I posted elsewhere, I wanted to fight a ticket. When I went in I discovered that if I did choose to fight but then lost, court costs would add $700. Look before you leap.
I work at Cleveland Muni Court. A certified letter clearly and politely setting forth your point of view, and asking for waiver of the late fees, might do some good. You could ask for a hearing but, as lobotomyboy63 said, that would increase your fees (not as high as $700, though). You could always ask the judge or magistrate to waive them, in any event.
It’s a common dodge for miscreants to steal a parking ticket off someone else’s car and put it on theirs so that the next traffic warden will think that car has already been ticketted.
I tried a similar ruse once (using my own ticket, not a stolen one) and returned to my motorcycle to find a second ticket taped atop the first. Cunning, those kampus kops…
If someone didn’t already say it, call them up with your licensce plate number, make/model/year/color of your car and your VIN and have them check that against the ticket. I once got a parking ticket from a city that my car had never been in. When they realized that on the ticket it had my plate number but everything else (color/make, VIN) was different, they got rid of the ticket. The officer had simply written down the plate wrong.
Oh, wait, are you saying you deserved the ticket, just didn’t receive it? (that sounds bad, I mean are you saying the ticket is legit, but you just didn’t know you got it?) Or are you saying you were never parked there to begin with?
I have no idea if it was legit or not, really. I parked there all the time. I had a class across the street and would show up at about 9:30 to park my car. Usually it was a couple of minutes after, occasionally it was a couple of minutes before. If it was bad weather I’d leave the house early in case of traffic, so sometimes that affected it. The meters say you can’t park there until after 9:30, so anyone who got there a few minutes early usually just sat in their car until 9:30 and then at the right time got out and put the money in the meter.
The only reason I can think of for having arrived 10 minutes early (that’s a lot more than usual) is if it had been a snowy day and I’d allowed for bad traffic and then not actually encountered any delays. If it was a snowy day I also would have been less likely to sit in my car in the cold than I otherwise would. This is the only explanation I can think of for why my car would have been there at 9:20. The ticket was way back in February, though, and it’s Cleveland where it snows a lot, so I don’t have any actual memory of some special day where I got there early and then didn’t stay with my car.
Yup. Back in the mid '80s I attended NC State University and worked part time as a parking enforcement nazi for the NCSU Division of Transportation. People would leave old tickets under their wipers, swipe someone else’s to make it look like they’d already been hit (we always checked) and sometimes you’d get students who were just plain assholes who would take the tickets so the poor slob who over-ran his meter never knew he had a five dollar fine to pay.
The thing about NCSU though, was that they had one person whose sole job it was to handle parking infraction appeals. I don’t remember if there was a form to fill out or if a letter sufficed, but more often than not the appeal was approved. I think the motives on approving appeals were that:
Campus parking is understandably a nightmare,
The Ticket Nazis (mostly students) wrote for every little violation that a more mature adult would probably overlook,
It was good for public relations, and
More people just paid the damn fine than bitched about it, so the parking fines still made a profit for the division. Granting an appeal created goodwill.
Contact by phone whichever department is responsible for parking and ask about their appeal process. Chances are very good that you’ll win.
Okay, wait. Let me clarify something here. When I said this:
I wasn’t implying that you should pay the damn fine and stop bitching about it. By “pay the damn fine” I meant that most of the time people got nicked for really stupid things and I was actually commenting on the fine itself, as most of them were extremely trivial infractions.
By “bitched about it” I meant that well, bitching about parking fines is what people do. And if you bitch loudly enough, sometimes you win. I meant no ill will by the horribly sucky way I phrased #4.
This page should give you the summary of weather at KBKL Cleveland Burke, OH, which is the official weather at the airport for the month of February 2008. There’s a day-by-day calendar labelled “Monthly Calendar Overview” that shows daily precipitation. You could match that up with the date of your ticket. Or you could go here and reset it for the date you want the weather data for.
I hope this was true in my case. I returned both tickets unpaid, with a letter explaining that I was visiting from out of state and touring the school grounds, unfamiliar with their parking restrictions. Also that the campus was lovely, and I would try not to let the ticket unpleasantness color my decision on whether to matriculate the next fall. All lies, naturally, but after twenty years evading arrest I feel fairly secure. Either they bought it, the statute of limitations has expired, or they have bigger parking fugitives to fry,
Then again, I might be swarmed by a SWAT team if I ever set foot on the UGA campus again. I’m looking out for the guy in the tree suit.
(it’s not a school parking ticket, it’s a city ticket.)