Parking Tickets

IT'S SAID the worst job on earth is meter maid.But your Intrepid One recently discovered something worse in the dirty deed department: paying for those tickets.Call it double jeopardy -- or even triple or quadruple jeopardy -- if pTC you happen to slip up, forget to shell out $20 for the violation and, heaven forbid, cause a flag to rise over your state Motor Vehicle Administration registration.That's when bureaucrats start laughing -- all the way to the bank.Such human error happened to your wheelster last month, dear drivers, and the memory remains fresh and painful.

ON BEHALF of parking ticketees everywhere I wish, like Spiro Agnew, to plead nolo contendere. There, is everyone happy? I once set a college record for most parking tickets in a single semester, and if anyone around here should be blushing, it ain't me, and maybe it shouldn't be those basketball players pursued by the University of Maryland student newspaper, the Diamondback.You read about this, didn't you? Yesterday we carried it on the front page of this very newspaper. The Diamondback wants to reveal names of basketball players at College Park who may have racked up big money in campus parking fines, and the university says, "Mind your own business."

I came to Baltimore from Latin America hoping to find revolution. I got one today -- battling the city's despotic parking regime.The rebels here look more like J-Crew models than a band of Sandinistas, and the upscale Federal Hill setting is a far cry from a Latin American hillside, where I spent more than two years covering civil strife for American newspapers.But the fight here is clearly as just: war against a government drunk with power.The big bad city government, you see, has decided to carpet-bomb our neighborhood with parking tickets.

Gary DeGourse and Steve Roderick are doing more than their share to bring people closer to the paperless society.In the past 19 years, they've built Micrographics Specialties Inc. from a basement operation that put images on microfilm into a multimillion-dollar information management company.And in their newest endeavor, they are digitizing images for the Internet. Next month, their $1 million deal with the National Archives Records Administration will launch a web site displaying some of their 120,000 scanned photos, maps and drawings.

Parking-ticket scofflaws will get the boot sooner if the Westminster Common Council approves a change in a city ordinance next month.The council took a first vote last week to reduce from three to two the number of unpaid tickets a motorist could have before city police could immobilize a vehicle with the mechanical boot.More is involved than the $12,000-plus in outstanding fines owed by violators, city officials said. It's only partly the money."Right now, there are 39 people with three outstanding [tickets]

As Baltimore County officials move aggressively to step up collections from the growing legion of parking scofflaws, the Susan Meehlings of the world pose a formidable challenge.Meehling is the county's champion parking scofflaw, owing nearly $8,000 for 22 parking tickets. But the Eastwood woman, whose liquor store business failed last year -- and whose car was towed two years ago because of the tickets and sold for scrap -- said the county isn't likely to collect."I don't have anything for them to take.

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 a $5 monthly administrative fee.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.

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.

Ellicott City business owners, who have long suffered from the downtown's parking problems, now foresee a new and perhaps bigger problem: customers being overzealously ticketed for breaking one of the new parking rules planned for the area.Although they signed off on new parking policies that will be phased in next month -- including parking meters, enforcement of tow-away zones and parking tickets -- some business owners are hardly optimistic."The problem is we don't know what else to do," said Charlotte Willis, president of the Ellicott City Business Association and owner of Gateway Travel on Main Street.

When they talk about the mindlessness of bureaucracies, what they really mean is the thing that happened to me this week involving some parking tickets, for which the city of Baltimore owes me $52, and miraculously admits it and still will not pay me the money.Nobody denies this basic and remarkable fact of the $52 -- not the accounting Supervisor Kenneth Baker, and not the nice lady who works for him who creatively suggests I can go on breaking the various traffic laws to straighten our accounts, and certainly not the Bureau of Treasury Management, collection division, which recently sent a piece of mail to my house, entitled Overpayment Notice, which declares officially and for all to see:"Our records indicate an overpayment in the amount of $52."