Before Barack Obama started his historic run for the presidency, he had to face the wrath of the Cambridge, Mass. parking officials.
Stuck with 15 unpaid parking tickets accrued while earning his law degree at Harvard in the early '90s, the then presidential hopeful forked over $400 in 2006 to pay for a variety of parking violations, including expired meters and parking at a crosswalk.
Fortunately for the country’s 44th commander in chief, he didn’t attend law school in Baltimore.
“If he had that number of unpaid tickets in Baltimore, he’d owe $49,000 today,” said Jason Howard, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who used Charm City's $16-per-month penalty to calculate the president’s long overdue balance.
“The penalties here are outrageous.”
Howard, 28, is one of thousands of people who are now receiving dunning letters from a city-hired law firm trying to collect on 80,000 unpaid parking tickets totaling $130 million in fees.
Howard’s ticket, which he received in 2006 for an expired meter, has ballooned from $27 to a whooping $600 fine.
“I still had Virginia plates, so the notices went to my old address,” he lamented.
“But I don’t think $600 is an appropriate penalty for a $27 fine. It’s like a license to print money."
Howard is not taking his fines sitting down. Instead he has formed a group of aggrieved people called Baltimore Scofflaws, replete with a dedicated blog and Facebook page, to unite people facing similar fines. Howard wants to band together enough angry scofflaws to force city officials to agree to amnesty
“We’ve already got a guy in Chicago who just got a bill for $9,000. What is he supposed to do?” he said. “What I hope to do is get the city to offer some sort of amnesty, and to change the laws.”
One sticking point for Howard is the severity of the city’s parking penalties that he said is usary.
“No other city seems to come close.”
Last December, Chicago offered amnesty for unpaid tickets. The program, which ended Feb. 28, collected $7 million and cleared 135,000 parking tickets and red light violations – with an average payment of $51 per violation. Las Vegas offered to waive fines, seeking to collect on 200,000 tickets – some dating back to 1970 – with a value of roughly $600 each.
Baltimore, however, in is in league by itself.
Forgoing amnesty, the city has threatened to sue scofflaws while seeking an eye-popping average sum of $1,625 per violation -- an amount unmatched by any other municipality across the country. Howard attributes Baltimore's higher-than- average take to the $16-a-month penalty that accumulates until a motorist contacts the city to make payment arrangements, a proviso of a law passed in 2007 that Howard said falls short.
“If they can’t get in touch with me the fines keep accumulating, so the city has an incentive not to find me.”
But errant motorists like Howard hoping that a severe economic downturn would prompt city officials to offer amnesty for unpaid citations can forget about it, according to a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon.
“The law prevents it,” said spokesman Scott Peterson, citing a city statute that allows amnesty only once per decade. “We have a budget deficit and this is one way to address it.”
Penalties are not the only problem, Howard said. Some alleged violators may be forced to pay hefty fines for violations they incurred through no fault of their own.
“The inspector general’s report said the MVA was swapping license plates. What if you got a ticket like that and you’re stuck with these fines?”
Indeed, a recent report issued by the city inspector’s general’s office revealed an MVA employee was giving drivers license plates that had been turned in by other motorists, resulting in an unwarranted ticket for an unsuspecting driver. Green’s report said the employee was arrested, but MVA officials have repeatedly denied knowledge of the scam, which Howard said proves his point.
“How many of these people are now stuck with huge bills?”
Mistakes too are not uncommon, said other area motorists forced to fight unwarranted tickets.
Dwight Johnson of Essex recently spent five hours at the city's Holiday Street collections office fighting an unwarranted ticket.
“They said I was parked downtown on Water Street on January 2 around midnight,” Johnson said. “But when I got the ticket, I just happened to remember I was home that night.”
Johnson decided to fight the ticket, taking time off from work to travel downtown and challenge the violation.
“When the clerk looked into it, they realized the agent had made a mistake -- it wasn’t my car,” Johnson said.
Even though he was able to clear his ticket, Johnson said he thought most people would simply pay it.
“There were five people at the office with tickets that were mistakes,” he said. “It just makes me wonder how many people pay who shouldn’t have to.”
sjanis@investigativevoice.com
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