By Emily Ford
eford@salisburypost.com
SALISBURY – The Salisbury Police Department can’t provide a list of the 25 worst parking offenders because the current system doesn’t track that information, Chief Rory Collins said.
The Post requested the names of the 25 worst violators of the parking ordinance when the city began enforcing stiffer penalties for repeated offenders and procrastinators.
Parking tickets remain $5 each, but the city now charges a $20 late fee for tickets more than 30 days old and a $50 fine for the fourth ticket issued within one month.
When requesting new parking ticket software last year on behalf of the Police Department, Downtown Salisbury Inc. Executive Director Randy Hemann told City Council that 25 people who work downtown often park illegally in two-hour spots intended for customers.
Taking up those spaces hour after hour, day after day, costs merchants an estimated $1.6 million in lost revenues each year, said Hemann.
In response to the Post’s public records request, Collins said the remark was the result of information provided during a discussion at a Downtown Parking Committee before Hemann’s presentation to City Council.
The downtown parking control specialist who works for the Police Department relayed the “informal” information, Collins said.
“The information given to the committee was merely from the employee’s recollection as he deals with the repeat offenders on a regular basis and was not the result of an electronic database search, as one does not exist,” Collins said.
The system in use by the Police Department does not include a parking citation module that would enable the tracking of worst offenders, Collins said.
“Our existing method of managing issued parking citations is manual,” he said.
The Police Department has the new software, but it’s not up and running yet, Collins said.
“At this point, the only way to determine the names of those individuals who have been the most frequent recipients of citations in our downtown would be to manually sift through many files of parking citations maintained within the Records Division of the Salisbury Police Department,” he said.
Collins apologized for not being able to accommodate the request and welcomed a reporter to manually review the citations to compile a list.
The new software will provide an automated tracking and billing system and quickly reveal if a vehicle meets the criteria for increased fines while the officer is ticketing the car.
Until the software comes online, the Police Department will use a revised manual method that will allow staff to track for repeat and non-paying offenders, Collins said.
Once the new system is finally in place, information collected since Aug. 27 – when heftier fines went into effect – will be entered into the new database to provide for easier and faster tracking, he said.
Contact reporter Emily Ford at 704-797-4264.