Article from: www.thenewspaper.com/news/11/1131.asp

5/16/2006

Los Angeles Makes $1 Million on Bogus Parking Tickets
Los Angeles makes more than a million dollars on parking tickets it issues to tens of thousands of innocent motorists.

Last year, parking tickets in Los Angeles, California generated $115,632,000 in revenue, and the city admits 150 innocent motorists are targeted each and every day.

"We write over 10 or 12,000 citations a day," Los Angeles Department of Transportation Chief Analyst Robert Andalon told KOVR-TV. "The error rate is about 100-150 citations that have this problem. There appears to be certain, either data entry problem, or a transposition problem that occurs."

Data entry errors of that magnitude mean the city is earning $1.3 million every year from drivers who have done nothing wrong. The admission came in an interview with a Sacramento television reporter who spoke with two local residents who live four hundred miles from Los Angeles. Neither Art Blakeman nor Dominick Puma have been to the city in years, but that didn't stop Los Angeles from sending both a number of collection notices for overdue parking tickets. Puma spent five months fighting his ticket.

In 1985, before the city sold parking services to a for-profit vendor, annual parking ticket revenue was a mere $18 million.

Source: LA Parking Tickets (KOVR-TV (CA), 5/16/2006)

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