TICKET FIX

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Sep/Oct 2005 by Lakamp, Patrick

City insiders dodge parking fines; database reveals biggest offenders

We already had looked at a database to find out who was getting the most parking tickets in Buffalo and to check where people were most likely to get ticketed.

Next, we wanted to know who got their tickets dismissed.

So The Buffalo News obtained a parking hearing database from City Hall detailing how hearing officers handled cases before them.

What we found were politicians and other insiders getting more of a break than most other people.

The scope of the breaks -$1,205 in one case - raised eyebrows.

But it was how they were getting the tickets dismissed that most infuriated readers, many of whom have had to skip work or school to drive downtown and wait in line to persuade a hearing officer they didn't deserve the parking tickets they received.

The insiders didn't wait in line. They simply wrote a letter to the head of the city's parking violations bureau.

We caught on to this after asking a simple question.

Which hearing officer goes by code number 75? We expected a name.

Instead, the answer led to more queries in our database of almost 24,000 parking ticket hearings, covering some 33,000 tickets over two years.

And those queries led to "The Ticket Fix," a 2,000-word front-page report published in April. The story detailed how a select few city insiders get many of their tickets dismissed.

Fines slashed

The parking hearing database has fields showing the violation, summons number, hearing date, fine amount and how much was paid or dismissed, among other information, for each hearing. The database also includes a code number for the hearing officer at each hearing.

News researcher Andrew Bailey matched the parking hearing database with another database of nearly 430,000 parking tickets. The parking ticket database offered more information, with fields for vehicle owner's name, address, license plate and location of the ticket. Matching the databases was possible because both included a field for summons number.

The city's Parking Violations Bureau gave us the code numbers for the hearing officers.

That allowed us to determine which hearing officer handled each case and develop a scorecard for each hearing officer. Chief hearing officer Randall Kay's code number was 5.

We queried the database with his code number to learn that he waived 31 percent of fines for those appearing before him, the lowest percentage of any hearing officer.

Then there were the 2,170 hearings under code 75. We didn't have a hearing officer's name for that code. The percentage of fines waived under that code, 71 percent, was the highest. We intended to identify and interview this hearing officer and compare his or her approach to hearings with Kay's approach.

When we inquired, the parking bureau's operations manager explained that code wasn't for a person but for tickets handled through a write-in defense for those who live 50 miles or more from the city.

So, we ran a query to find out where these people live.

It turns out most live in the city.

And some names showed up repeatedly, including judges, political leaders, city hall officials and two of the mayor's brothers.

They wrote letters to the city's parking enforcement director, who passed them along to a hearing officer. Two-thirds of the time, their tickets went away. If not, the fines usually were slashed. Overall, 85 percent of fines on the insiders' contested tickets were dropped. For everybody else, 49 percent of the fines were dropped.

Many of the insiders' dismissed violations were for parking at expired meters. The dismissals also included expired inspections and expired registration stickers. A city court judge got $265 waived on five expired inspection tickets.

Some won dismissals after being ticketed for parking on the wrong side of the street by their homes. The mayor's brothers got a combined $150 dismissed from tickets on the street where one lived.

So, who ruled on these letter-writing appeals?

It was Kay - the hearing officer who's tough on those without connections. The parking enforcement director said while he forwards the letters, and half the time writes accompanying notes, Kay decides the fate of the tickets. Kay said the parking director's notes allowing otherwise unauthorized parking are often the basis for the dismissals.

Even Kay has benefited from this system.

Kay hasn't paid a city parking ticket in two years, even though he got seven, totaling $245, while on the job at City Hall. The parking bureau staff dismissed six without a hearing, including one for parking too close to a fire hydrant. Kay's car was ticketed when there were no available spaces next to City Hall, where he's allowed to park for free.

Lessons learned from others

Readers were furious. Almost a month later, the story remained among the top five issues on the minds of those writing letters to the newspaper.

A reader wrote that Kay had rejected her husband's appeal of a ticket, given to him while he accompanied her to the hospital where doctors treated her for internal bleeding.