PORTLAND, Ore. — Two years ago, Portland State University student Devin Witter had racked up so many parking tickets that the city towed his road-worn Hyundai Accent from a downtown street.
When Witter went to pick up his car, the attendant told him he could get it back, but only if he paid off his citations. “The car wasn’t even worth the amount I owed in parking fines,” Witter said. “So I just left it there, figuring the city would sell the car, pay off the tickets and that would be that.”
That wasn’t that.
After late fees and collection costs, the state says Witter still owes $9,669 for 36 unpaid tickets, putting him on the short list of Portland’s worst parking scofflaws.
At the top: An Internet marketing manager who owes $12,565 and a Maserati owner with a $11,539 tab.
But even if those debts were paid off tomorrow, they would barely make a dent in $32.4 million in unpaid tickets owed to a City Hall reluctant to get more aggressive with parking deadbeats.
The list of Portland’s parking deadbeats is exhaustive and costly.
As the city struggles to dig up funding for everything from potholes to huge regional commitments like the new Sellwood Bridge, more than 190,500 parking citations from the past 10 years are still listed as unpaid.
The dilemma isn’t unique to Portland. But the city’s approach to getting repeat offenders to pay up is decidedly less draconian than other large U.S. cities.
Chris Warner, chief of staff for Portland Commissioner Steve Novick, who oversees the Bureau of Transportation, said there have been some discussions about exploring new ways to go after parking revenue that’s owed.
“But we don’t really have the resources to go there and collect it on our own,” Warner told The Oregonian (http://is.gd/fby36S). “This is something we should probably be getting better at.”
The city’s long-time system depends on random victories.
Once a vehicle receives at least six citations in which the fines have doubled or amount to at least $500, the courts issue a “tow warrant.” Each week, the Multnomah County Circuit Court uploads a list of hundreds of license plates with warrants to parking officers’ handheld ticketing computers.
“PBOT’s role in collections is to act on the unpaid citations list that the court sends us each week,” said Diane Dulken, a spokeswoman for the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
If an officer happens to stumble across one of the vehicles on a daily patrol, and can verify through a dispatcher that it hasn’t recently changed ownership, a tow is ordered.
Of course, the verification protocol alone typically takes about five minutes. Officers say there have been times when they watched a vehicle owner walk up and drive off before the tow truck arrives.
Mark Friedman, manager of PBOT’s parking division, considers it a vigorous approach.
Still, the number of vehicles spotted and towed under the strategy can fluctuates wildly from year to year. In 2013, for example, the city nabbed 362 vehicles with tow warrants. Last year, PBOT towed 131.
Seattle has abandoned the hope-and-a-prayer approach to tracking down cars of parking scofflaws.
In 2011, when unpaid parking fines hit $26 million, the city dedicated two officers to hunting down parking scofflaws in high-tech vans equipped with license-plate recognition cameras.
When a van detects a plate with four or more tickets, the officer stops and locks the car’s wheels with a 16-pound metal boot.
Seattle hoped to recoup $3 million in the first two years. But in its first year alone, the city’s car-booting campaign reportedly brought in $2.2 million.
Spokane has found similar success with two-fisted boot patrols that started targeting people with at least four unpaid parking tickets last summer.
After the first six months, the number of unpaid parking tickets was cut in half, compared to the same period the previous year, the city reported.
Some transportation researchers insist car-booting motivates people to pay overdue parking tickets more than towing, primarily because it publicly shames motorists and serves as a reminder to others to quickly take care of their fines.
A few years ago, New Jersey-based PayLock — which leases out the plate-scanning vans used in Seattle, Detroit, Denver and several other cities — approached Portland city officials with a similar search-and-boot plan to recover uncollected parking revenue.
City Hall wasn’t interested.
“We do not use the boot because our goal is to open up parking on the street,” Friedman said. “The boot keeps the space occupied, which is why we tow vehicles that have unpaid parking citations.”
Portland’s problem with outstanding parking fines appears to be getting worse.
In 2010, Multnomah County Circuit Court reported a collection rate of about 90 percent. It now sits at 80 percent, court officials said.
In Oregon, refusing to pay a parking ticket isn’t illegal.
If you simply ignore a citation, the state can add serious late fees — often more than tripling the fine within four months — and put a red mark on your credit report that will last up to 20 years.
“We don’t give up on them easily,” said Phil Lemman, spokesman for the Oregon Judicial Department, which manages the state’s most egregious cases.
In fact, the Oregon Department of Revenue has the authority to go after state tax refunds and kicker checks whenever possible, Lemman said.
At the same time, Warner worries that many of the people on the city’s parking-scofflaw list have found themselves in what amounts to a modern-day debtors’ prison: they need their cars to get to work but can’t afford to pay off citations even before they balloon with late fees.
“How do you garnish that?” Warner asked.
In many cases, people decide it’s cheaper to just buy a new car than recover one towed because of unpaid tickets.
That’s what Stacy Skreen, Portland’s most-wanted parking violator, did.
Skreen owes $12,565 on 36 citations, most of them for having expired license tags when she worked in downtown Portland.
In an email, she said her car couldn’t pass emissions testing because it needed a custom-built part.
Skreen, who now works for a Beaverton Internet marketing firm, said she is a single mom with a son in school and day care who has to drive.
Eventually, PBOT towed her car. She couldn’t pay the fines to get it back, so she purchased another one. “I am making payments on the parking tickets,” Skreen said.
The Department of Revenue may never catch up to Witter, who said he was struggling financially while pursuing a master’s degree in education at Portland State University.
He moved across the country last year. He said he hasn’t received a single notice in the mail about his unpaid tickets from the state or any collection agency.
“Like I said,” Witter said, “I assumed they would sell the car and that would pay the tickets. I’ve never heard from anyone about it, so I thought the matter was taken care of.”
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