City of Glens Falls

Parking Ticket Operations - Executive Summary

The City of Glens Falls (City) issues parking tickets for parking violations pursuant to the New York State (NYS) Vehicle and Traffic Law and the City’s Code for vehicle and traffic regulations. Any individual who receives a parking ticket may settle the ticket by paying a fine within 10 days. After 10 days, the fine amount doubles. Individuals may also choose to protest the ticket. If an individual fails to take action on the ticket, the City has certain options available for enforcement. These options include sending delinquency notices, participating in the NYS Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Parking Scofflaw Program, increasing penalties, instituting amnesty programs, taking civil action, impounding and immobilizing vehicles and using private collection services.

The City’s Parking Violations Bureau is responsible for the collection of fines from parking related violations. Fines are deposited directly in a dedicated bank account in the custody of the City Comptroller.

Scope and Objective

The objective of our audit was to determine if the City is properly accounting for and pursuing collection of all issued parking tickets. Our audit addressed the following question for the period January 1, 2004 through June 30, 2005:

• Is the City properly accounting for all parking tickets, and pursuing collection of all parking tickets issued?

Audit Results

Our audit disclosed that parking fine revenue has steadily decreased from $53,800 in 1999 to $21,745 in 2004. The decrease can be directly attributed to a reduction in the number of citations being issued¹ and the City’s failure to utilize available ticket enforcement options. In 1999, the City issued 4,893 parking tickets and had a 66 percent collection rate. In 2004, the City issued only 2,527 parking tickets and had a 59 percent collection rate.

The City has not established a benchmark standard or goals for their enforcement procedures. We did note however that the 66 percent collected in 1999 and 2000, while the highest of the five fiscal years, is still significantly below the industry standard of 85 percent. The City has taken an extremely passive approach to enforcing its outstanding parking tickets which has resulted in a lower than average rate of collection. While numerous options are available to the City to increase its enforcement percentage, the City has generally not utilized them at all.

In addition, we observed certain internal control weaknesses in the administration of the parking violations program. We found that the City has not established a comprehensive policy for the program’s activities, and that the controls that were in place were not sufficient to account for the inventory of issued and unissued tickets or the collection status of the delinquent tickets.

Comments of Local Officials

The results of our audit and recommendations have been discussed with City officials and their comments, which appear in Appendix A, have been considered in preparing this report. City officials generally agreed with our recommendations and indicated they planned to initiate corrective action.