ALBANY --A year following a  parking ticket scandal the city has pulled in almost $1 million more in parking fines and surcharges so far this year in spite of the fact that its parking enforcement officials are giving out fewer tickets.

The numbers highlight the inefficiencies that racked the city's old parking fine collection system -- problems that had been exposed in a succession of unique Council hearings last summer.

State auditors found that the city's tracking of parking enforcement violations so opaque in a number of cases that they couldn't say for certain what amount of money Albany forfeited by giving out unregulated totally free parking privileges for years.

Taken as a whole, collections were up 36 %, or $915,540, through 30th September of the current year.

For the city that has meant that approximately $715,000 in extra revenue after paying out  the 7.5 percent that Albany pays to Complus Data Innovations, the corporation that supplied the new software and IT equipment.

The city state that it is the benefit of having a 21st-century IT {system|program
But the increase in collections goes against two other trends: The city's public service officers, or PSOs, are ticketing fewer cars and also the total amount of those violations which are written has dropped.

Through July, figures show that the total figure of tickets given out  was lower by approximately 4,000, or seven percent over the previous year, and also the complete dollar value of those tickets was down 27 percent.
Sheehan said the slump in parking fine writing is an enforcement matter that she has discussed with police Chief Steven Krokoff, whose department oversees the public service officers.

Councilman Daniel Herring speculated that it might be linked, a minimum of in part, to the state moving much more workers from downtown offices towards the Harriman State Workplace Campus.

The trend appears to contradict one from the perceived advantages of the new system: That PSOs may really turn out to be much more productive simply because their new hand-held computers would require them to rely less on time-consuming hand writtten parking tickets.

The city expects to collect about $3.6 million in fines and surcharges next year, up almost $350,000 from what it collected in 2009 -- the first full year after the Times Union revealed that thousands of tickets were being inappropriately issued with no fines whatsoever.

The State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli disclosed the city issued at least 57,420 no-fine tickets between 2001 and 2008, in spite of having no distinct policy authorizing or governing their issue.

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