City hall says no specific number of outstanding parking tickets would cause it to tow a vehicle since a proposed impound bylaw’s main objective is to encourage residents to pay their fines.
Andrew Svenson, director of legislative and enforcement services, said during the Jan. 29 executive committee meeting that collecting parking fees and fines is important to the city’s budget. However, not everyone who parks fills the meters, so the municipality loses revenue.
“And it looks like you need severe-enough enforcement provisions to get people to pay the proper fee to use the city’s parking services,” he stated.
The proposed bylaw is an attempt to collect more than $1 million in overdue fines, while its purpose is to give city hall a mechanism — towing — to acquire those fees, he added.
A report presented during the meeting showed that as of December 2022, 4,017 motorists owed $1,080,000 in outstanding parking fines.
It’s interesting to read the data and how many people are in arrears since this is a significant amount of money, said Coun. Crystal Froese. She wondered how many parking tickets or amounts owed would trigger the city to tow vehicles and what the process would look like.
“There is not a magical number out there. The intent isn’t to tow vehicles; it’s to use when fines aren’t paid,” said Svenson, noting the city’s initial efforts will target repeat offenders with larger fines.
There are many details with towing vehicles, although such activities are time intensive since it takes a while to locate a tow truck, he continued. Furthermore, the numbers towed would depend on space in the companies’ compounds.
Svenson said the city would not tow vehicles daily but would engage in “blitzes” to encourage people to pay within a certain time or see their autos taken. Once enough people pay, the city could determine whether it needs to continue those blitzes or tow vehicles.
Froese also wondered if council should insert a specific number in the proposed bylaw because she worried that the municipality could tow people with fines of less than $100.
Svenson replied that people should know that towing is an option, so they should pay their overdue fines. However, he was willing to accept more direction from council on the matter.
Froese later said the proposed bylaw had “some teeth in it,” and when it returns to council for official approval, it would put motorists on notice to pay or face an impounded car.
The city should use a collections agency to acquire outstanding fines, especially since it’s difficult to collect them from people living in other municipalities, said Coun. Doug Blanc. Such an agency could at least collect 15 per cent of overdue fines from those people, which was better than nothing.
Since the report indicated city staff and towing companies are worried that residents may assault them, Blanc said police should charge those people quickly to ensure such actions don’t happen again.
“Most people are paying (their tickets anyway) … I think we should be trying to get that other 20 per cent of people to pay their fines,” said Mayor Clive Tolley.
He then wondered if the city could apply those unpaid fees to property taxes and, because the city had no collections agency, whether there was another process to acquire overdue tickets.
Svenson replied no to both inquiries. Meanwhile, he said towing companies would have the authority to sell seized vehicles to recover the outstanding fees. However, if the vehicles’ values are insufficient, they won’t be towed.
Coun. Kim Robinson thought some members’ concerns were “silly” since council had asked city administration to develop an enforcement method — and here it was. It didn’t matter to him whether towing companies accessed people’s private property to take vehicles.
What bothered Robinson, though, was he had asked city administration in June 2023 to provide an updated bylaw to address vacant and derelict properties and hadn’t seen anything since. Yet, city hall had quickly produced an impound bylaw to address outstanding fines — which made him wonder whose priorities were higher.
The next executive committee meeting is Monday, Feb. 12.
