By Sarah Wallace

Ticket Tracer program pays for itself

Aug 15, 2013 | 6:51 AM

The City of Prince Albert’s tool to help crack down on unpaid parking tickets in the city has paid for itself since it was introduced.

The Ticket Tracer program is a software package that the city purchased and it allows the city a much more efficient means of tracking and prosecuting all new tickets, said Joe Day, the city’s financial services director.

Around the time it got the software, the city hosted a blitz to try and collect some of the outstanding tickets that had been sitting for some time.

“Unrelated to the Ticket Tracer software itself, but around the same time that we were implementing some changes we did do a bit of a push to try and get some collections on, what at the time was believed to be about $50,000 to $100,000 of outstanding fines; and we did collect approximately $60,000 in unpaid fines dating back a few years,” Day said.

He said the city also collected another $20,000 from unpaid convictions that just hadn’t been collected and have actually been sitting in the possession of the court as collections under them.

Missing pet

'She means the world to our family': Woman seeks help in finding missing pet parrot

21h ago

BE CAREFUL ON THE ROADS

Semi flips outside P.A.; one of dozens of incidents on Sask. roads due to winter weather

21h ago

NO GO FOR BUSES

School bus routes outside P.A. canceled due to spring snowstorm

Apr 18, 2024

“What happened was Saskatchewan legislation changed a few years prior to us buying the software package Ticket Tracer and the legislation enabled a few changes in processes that our old software couldn’t accommodate, so by buying the new software we could utilize the new provisions of the legislation, and the most significant of that was to be able to mail summonses to people as opposed to personally serving summonses, and then we could also proceed with what was called ‘default convictions,’” he said.

“So, if somebody received a parking ticket, choose not to pay by the early payment option and it got to the point where the next step would be for them to go to court to either plead guilty or not guilty we could do a lot of the process now through mail to notify them of the court date, as opposed to having to personally serve them to get them to come to a court date.”

He said if they don’t show up to their court date they could be convicted of being guilty in their absence and then the city can move on with collection of the funds.

Day said the new process has helped them smooth out the process of collecting funds.

“What the city has yet to move forward with and we’ll soon be doing so, or anticipate moving forward with a report to council, is moving forward to stepping up our enforcement techniques for people who leave tickets unpaid after a number of months or years,” Day explained.

“So, again, the provincial legislation changed which allows municipalities to impound vehicles and we have not moved that far yet, there’s certain things we have to make sure we have in place first such as in impound lot and a process for people to pay and retrieve their vehicles.

But once we get all those processes in place we could step up our level of enforcement for the few people who are still delinquent payers of traffic tickets.”

The upfront cost of the software was fairly reasonable according to Day and since coming into play, Ticket Tracer, along with things such as increasing parking costs, has covered its cost.

The 2012 service review shows that from 2008 to 2012, there was an increase of about $300,000 in ticket revenue, going from about $150,000 in 2008 to $358,000 in 2012.

Day said the increase was caused by a number of things, including Ticket Tracer. “It would be an increase in fines to, especially, handicap no parking, fire zones and expired meters.”

He also attributes the increase to a higher level of enforcement with the city seeing the addition of another staff member who’s out writing tickets. He said there has also been an increase in people actually paying their fines.

Tickets for expired meters start at $10 in the discount period and go up to $25 after that. Handicap parking tickets can run anywhere from $150 in the discount period and up to $300-$450.

How the Ticket Tracer software works

According to Day, “the software itself is basically a tracing software so that when our ticket writers write tickets during the day, about twice a day they come in and provide those copies of the tickets they’ve written to one of our staff here at city hall who enters that ticket information into the Ticket Tracer software.”

From there, the information like when the ticket was written and some of the information about the vehicle and the owner of the vehicle gets all matched up through the SGI data base.

“And then what happens is that it starts the timer as to ok you’ve got so many days to pay at the early discounted rate and if those number of days elapse you then go up to the normal rate of $25 … so the software tracks that,” Day explained.

Once the ticket has gone past the discounted rate window of 10 days, a letter would be sent out to the ticket holder advising them of when a court date is set.

At the court date, the person can enter a plea or explanation of what transpired as to why they did not pay their ticket and if they don’t show up they will get a default condition or a guilty verdict and that’s all explained in the letter that’s sent out.

“It’s really a system to just track a lot of dates and information about each ticket because there’s so many regulated timelines with respect to tickets and court proceedings so that’s really all Ticket Tracer really is – just a complex tracking device.”

swallace@panow.com

On Twitter: @sarahthesquid