Parking-fine discount a victim of use it or lose it

Erin Neff

Thursday, Dec. 21, 2000 | 10:07 a.m.

The Las Vegas City Council took a cue from the Grinch on Wednesday by eliminating a discount program for people who pay parking tickets in a timely manner.

Not only did the board unanimously stop the program, it did so because motorists had actually overpaid the city $680,000.

Instead of refunding the money and offering a better explanation of how the program was supposed to work, the city eliminated it without comment. Adding insult to anyone whose attendance at the meeting led to an expired meter violation, brochures hyping the city's programmable cash keys were handed out for good measure.

The Early Payment Reduction Program once allowed people to pay only 50 percent of the total parking fine if they paid within 15 days. Thus, a $20 ticket in the lot next to City Hall could be $10 if paid quickly.

But since few motorists knew about the program, or read the fine print at the bottom of their ticket, violators often sent in the full $20 during the 15-day reduction period.

"The difficulty of deciding how to apply the overpayments, including how and to whom to provide refunds, has created more of a problem than the program was worth," wrote Mike Sheldon, director of Detention and Enforcement, in his proposal to eliminate the reduced ticket program.

In 1999, 107,000 parking citations were eligible for the reductions. Of that amount, 31,860 paid the full $20 within the 15-day time period.

"Assuming all those individuals who paid off their parking citations within 15 days would have paid off their parking citations within 30 days without the early payment reduction program, the cost of the program to the city in 1999 was approximately $319,000," the audit stated.

The overpayments are creating their own problems. Any overpayment over three years old has been written off. More recent overpayments will likely be used to pay administrative fees amassed by repeat parking ticket scofflaws.

An estimated $8.6 million in outstanding parking fines and penalties has amassed in the past five years.

As residents picked up their agendas for Wednesday's meeting, they were also offered a brochure instructing them how to purchase cash debit keys that are programmed for use in the city's meters.

The brochure comes with a warning a little more clear than the old tickets used to read about the reduced-fine program.

"The Cash Key is equivalent to money," the brochure reads. "So, in the unfortunate event that you lose your key, the ($12) deposit and any remaining value cannot be refunded."

Neither can that $680,000.