This week, the city clerk’s office released a report with 14 recommendations for overhauling Chicago’s much-criticized system of vehicle fees, fines and ticketing.
City Clerk Anna Valencia, who led a task force that looked into the problem, wisely did not call for immediate, sweeping change. And, indeed, the City Council and City Hall should take enough time to get this right. Let’s get to the root causes of why so many Chicagoans are riled up about parking tickets and sticker fees.
Ask the critics — and they are everywhere — and they’ll tell you the whole system is nothing but a money grab aimed at the wallets of people who can least afford to pay. Our own view is that the reality is likely more complicated, but any degree of racial, economic or social inequity is unacceptable.
Are we all treated the same? Or does the system go harder on folks in certain neighborhoods — or of a certain color?
To that end, we strongly support the report’s key recommendation for a “comprehensive review” of fees, fines and ticketing enforcement. We’ve made that very point in the past.
Chicago has a long, abundantly-documented history of racial discrimination in nearly every aspect of life: housing, public schools, policing, access to grocery stores and parks. So we’re not surprised that something as mundane as who gets a parking ticket has been caught up in questions of racial bias, too, as a series of investigative reports by ProPublica Illinois and WBEZ strongly suggest.
Thousands of low-income African-American Chicagoans — proportionately far more than other Chicagoans — file for bankruptcy, lose their cars, have their license suspended, get shut out of city jobs and more because of unpaid ticket debts and fines, the investigative reports found.
We see a lot of good sense in one group of recommendations made by the task force. The report calls for easing the burden on low-income people who are drowning in debt by creating less restrictive ticket payment plans, forgiving some old ticket debt and unpaid fines, and ending — or at least curbing — the practice of impounding cars car for unpaid tickets and fees.
We’re less sold on other recommendations, such as allowing scofflaws to do community service to pay off their tickets. There’s a creepy feeling of indentured servitude about that — and what a bureaucracy it would create.
That kind of reform would only make it easier for poor people to pay up, without addressing the suspicions of bias.
Along those lines, here’s the kind of basic review City Hall could do: Conduct random spot checks across the city to count illegally parked cars. Then compare those findings, neighborhood by neighborhood, with the actual ticketing data. If parking enforcement in Chicago has gone sideways, we would think that would become clear.
If the survey turns up just as many illegally parked cars in, say, North Center as in East Garfield Park — but fewer actual parking tickets — we’ve got a bias problem. If, on the other hand, the survey revealed that people in East Garfield Park just park illegally more often, so be it.
Spot checks such as this are one idea. Traffic control experts surely have others that would be just as effective at rooting out discrimination.
Chicago can’t just let parking scofflaws completely off the hook, wherever they live. A city has to maintain order on its streets. And it would be unfair to all the drivers who obey the rules.
But as a city, we want to feel confident the system is not rigged against anybody. And we don’t want the least fortunate among us to be saddled with unfair, crushing debt.
See letters at letters@suntimes.com
