A Rockville man died owing the Town of Union Bridge $16.
His parking ticket, dated Dec. 1, 1978, is among two decades' worth of parking tickets crammed into dust-covered boxes in the town hall. Some parking tickets have been paid. Many haven't. Overdue tickets are assessed $5 monthly administrative fees.
Nobody in town knows for sure how many tickets remain unpaid. Meter monitor Ellen Leppo stopped keeping track years ago.
"I got tired of keeping tally," she said.
Hoping to collect on some of these unpaid tickets, town officials are launching a 30-day amnesty program. They're hoping parking violators from the past three years will pay up. Those who do will be forgiven half the monthly administrative fee.
Amnesty will begin, "as soon as we can get the letters out," said Council President Bret D. Grossnickle, chairman of the town's police committee.
Union Bridge nets about $1,000 a year in parking fines. That amount is less than half of 1 percent of the town's annual $495,000 budget.
If parking violators over the past 20 years paid their fines -- and half the monthly administrative fee -- Union Bridge could garner enough money to pay a substantial chunk of its $171,830 debt on the new town hall.
But Grossnickle is not optimistic about collecting on many of the overdue tickets. He said it would not be cost-effective to try to collect tickets more than three years overdue.
The council increased meter fines last summer from the long-standing $1 fine to $5. The fine for no-parking zone violations was increased from $10 to $25.
How can a town that has just 59 parking meters on two streets and that charges only 5 cents an hour to park have so many unpaid parking tickets?
"I don't know. We've hassled this out for years, and a lot of the communications breakdown is with [the] MVA," said Mayor Perry Jones, the other member of the town police committee.
He said collections dropped off after the state Motor Vehicle Administration changed from yearly to two-year vehicle registrations in July 1992.
The mayor recalled a Main Street couple who both owned cars and both parked at expired meters. Neither was very good at paying tickets before they were due.
"They would pay $1,500 a year to get their tags," he said.
Vehicles with outstanding tickets are still flagged under the revised MVA system, and owners can't renew their registrations until outstanding fines are paid, said Jim Lang, MVA spokesman.
"I don't believe there are chunks of Marylanders out there who are forgotten flagged people," he said.
Jones said some of Union Bridge's ticket offenders have found ways around the MVA.
"We had family members who were switching [registrations] back and forth. We had a lot of problems with that," he said.
Other violators are out-of-state residents whose cars don't get flagged. Union Bridge has a Denver boot and can immobilize cars whose owners have three or more outstanding tickets in a 30-day period. But it's hard to catch offenders' cars because the town shares a resident trooper with New Windsor, Grossnickle said.
And he's not eager to put the boot on without an officer present.
Pub Date: 5/26/96
