'Our parking ordinance has no teeth'

COEUR d’ALENE — For almost two years, parking violators in Coeur d'Alene have been skating by without having to pay their tickets.

But that could change once the city revamps its enforcement contract with Diamond Parking.

The city council met Tuesday and approved four new contracts that city staff members have negotiated with Diamond Parking. The city has been operating the downtown parking system without a parking administration contract for nearly two years, unable to enforce collection of parking fines.

“Enforcement has not been so aggressive,” said City Finance Director Troy Tymesen. “We don't have a contract, so we have no way to collect on them.”

Tymesen said the city’s original contract with Diamond expired a couple years ago, but the city had to completely renegotiate that contract to include the parking garage at McEuen Park and the Third Street Boat Launch. The city also renegotiated contracts for public boat mooring, public parking lots and street parking.

Tymesen said the city also looked into taking parking administration in-house during that time, but it didn’t prove feasible.

“We explored that option,” he said, adding it made more sense to go with outside administration. “We are not set up to run collections at the city.”

But some parking offenders will get away without paying some of those tickets because even when the city enters into a contract with Diamond Parking, the company is prohibited from collecting on unpaid parking tickets that are more than 9 months old, “and all efforts to collect any unpaid parking violation charge shall cease 12 months from the date of issuance of the parking ticket,” the contract states.

Tymesen said that provision of the contract stems from an agreement the city made in the late 1980s to settle a lawsuit that challenged the city’s parking laws, and it is in all the new contracts.

“It was in the old contract as well,” Tymesen said.

Tymesen said while any unpaid fines that are 9 months old cannot legally be collected, the offenders still have a moral obligation to pay them.

“They owe those tickets,” he said in an interview before the council meeting, adding he is going to recommend that Diamond begin the collections process on all unpaid parking tickets up to 9 months old as soon as the contract is signed. “I will press for that based on what’s in the contract.”

During the council meeting, Tymesen detailed how much money the city is losing through its Third Street Boat Launch program and the overall inability to collect those fines.

On the boat launch fees, the city went from $17,000 a year to $2,000 this past boating season. He said the boat launch fees are currently collected on an honor system. The city has a pay box at the top of the ramp and signage instructing people who to pay their launch fees.

The city had an employee-operated gate system to access that lot and boat launch before the McEuen Park makeover.

Tymesen told the council the city will work with Diamond to develop a better collection system.

“We are down on parking fine collections by $7,000 year over year,” he told the council, explaining that prior to the contracts ending the city collected between $47,000 and $49,000 per year in parking fines. Last year the city only took in $39,000, but he said the number of tickets issued was also down last year.

“This has been going on for a long time,” Mayor Steve Widmyer said in an interview before the council meeting. He was referring to the city’s overall inability to collect parking fines. “Our parking ordinance has no teeth.”

Widmyer said he has asked the city attorney to look into ways to strengthen the parking ordinances.

“We need a better means of collection,” the mayor said. “It used to be if my daughter got a parking ticket and slipped it under the seat of the car, I would get a letter two or three weeks later to remind me to pay it. Those letters haven’t been going out for more than a year and a half — for whatever reason. We need to fix that.”

Tymesen said the city’s parking commission is looking into stronger enforcement measures. He said wheel locks may be used to entice repeat offenders to pay their tickets in the future. He said the city can look at recent collection reports to determine who those offenders are.

“If we find an offender with more than four outstanding tickets, we are considering booting cars,” he said, adding that is not in any of the Diamond contracts yet.

In short, Tymesen said, the city’s parking codes have two primary weaknesses he plans to address.

“Weakness No. 1 is the boat launch,” he said. “And weakness No. 2 is getting our collections back up.”