According to village Trustee Kathryn Carlson, discussions regarding fines began when the board was talking about parking fees for construction. Over the past three years the village has averaged a 40 percent return on parking tickets, she said during the board’s Nov. 23 meeting.
“As we investigated why this would be, several factors came out,” Carlson said.
For starters, the village does not have a successful means of collecting fines. Second, there is a lack of communication when it comes to reminding people they owe the village those fines.
Carlson went on to say the committee — which includes herself, Trustee Tim Lynn and Police Chief Lloyd Perkins — began looking at what they could do to correct the two problems, starting with soliciting information from other villages similar in size to Skaneateles as to what has worked best for them.
Ultimately, the best deterrent for parking violators is a wheel lock, more commonly known to some as a “boot” placed on the tires of those in violation. According to Carlson, a wheel lock costs approximately $500 for one, and communities of similar size to Skaneateles have found only one is needed and rarely used.
“People who have used it have been very happy,” Carlson said.
According to Perkins, Lake Placid, a community extremely similar to Skaneateles, has used their wheel lock twice in four years. As a result of instituting the device, the village has seen the meter revenues go up and the number of parking tickets go down. There has been very little public outcry, he added.
Larger communities, such as the cities of Auburn and Syracuse, use the wheel lock fairly regularly and sometimes daily.
Carlson likened the wheel lock to the village’s backup generator — you hope you never have to use it, but are glad to have it when it’s needed.
However, the committee isn’t recommending the village skip all other steps before jumping on the wheel lock train. They recommend starting out with an amnesty period in which those who have received parking tickets will also receive a notification that their fine is due or past due.
“In order to make this work, we need to have better linkage between all departments,” Carlson said.
Those departments include the village office, the police department, the courts and dispatch, she said. The committee has begun investigating a database to help them keep better track of parking tickets, who has received them, how many and if they’ve paid or not.
According to Carlson, at the end of the amnesty period, if the violator hasn’t paid within 30 days the system would generate a letter giving an additional 30 days. If after the extension the fine still is not paid, they receive a violation notice and the fine is doubled.
The end result would be use of the wheel lock or the vehicle will be impounded.
Carlson said the committee has been assured that the database will be automatic and need little human interaction.
“The goal right now is to make it less labor intensive,” Perkins said about the system under discussion.
The company that would be designing the database is the same company that created a system for Solvay. According to Carlson, Solvay’s database in an intranet that is not Web based, whereas the parking committee is looking into a Web-based program. It has been indicated the program would be a month-to-month payment of around $250 with no up front cost.
No matter what the board decides, there needs to be a remedy to the communication issue between departments. There are currently 42 printed pages of people who have three or more tickets.
“The backlog we see here is nobody’s fault,” Perkins said. “There’s no teeth in the [current] law.”
All paid parking areas would be subject to any new regulations. The board did not vote to have Attorney Michael Byrne begin writing a local law to implement the system, however the trustees agreed that the cost of a wheel lock device is reasonable.
“For $500 we can bring fairness to the process,” Lynn said.
