The Transportation Office now uses a third-party company to collect fines for unpaid parking tickets issued on campus.
Over the last year, the office has started outsourcing the collection of unpaid parking violations to a Massachusetts company called Municipal Management, according to Elizabeth Gentry, assistant vice president of financial and administrative services. If a driver does not pay the fine within 21 days of the violation, Municipal Management sends additional notifications before ultimately reporting the driver to a credit bureau.
"People don't like for that kind of thing to happen" to their credit reports, Gentry said. "For a $30 or $60 ticket, that's really not wise."
Gentry said the process is meant to get drivers to pay their fines. She said drivers should not consider a ticket something that "doesn't really matter" just because it comes from the University instead of the city.
Parking officers have also recently started to take photographs of cars that are illegally parked, making it easier to verify a violation if the driver disputes it, Gentry said. When unpaid violations are outsourced, the Massachusetts vendor can use the plate information to look up the owner of the car and his or her address in a national database.
The fine payment system also moved online, a change Gentry said makes it easier to "negotiate the parking system."
The money from parking fines goes into the Transportation Office's operating budget, which helps to cover, among other things, the costs of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority UPass program — which allows free rides with a Brown ID — shuttles and Zipcar, Gentry said.
Despite recent budget tightening and a loss of parking space revenue due to construction, Gentry said, there has been no need to actively increase ticketing. The number of tickets issued has been constant in recent years, with officers issuing between 4,500 and 5,000 tickets annually.
The application for a student parking permit gives the University the authorization to bill a student's account for any fines "owing as a result of unpaid parking tickets issued … for violations of University parking rules."
"We have continued to manage the enforcement of the parking much as we always have," Gentry said. "We don't go out there searching (for people to ticket)… We're trying to make sure that the spaces that people are paying for are available for them to park in."
Gentry said the Transportation Office has never had a problem with drivers repeatedly parking without permits. She added that people who do pay for parking are in general "not inclined to do things that would jeopardize their parking ability."
According to the Transportation Office website, drivers are fined $30 for a first parking violation, after which the fine increases. Gentry said a driver's violation record never resets because the fines are punitive and meant to deter future violations.
Increasing fines also reduces the likelihood that people would be willing to get tickets as a way to pay less than the cost of a permit, Gentry added.
