By Pat McGlone
Two myths about parking tickets in Lexington: One, that it’s mainly college students who get ticketed. Two, that Lexington strictly enforces time limits as a source of money.
Not true in either case, the city says.
According to the officer who rides around town in a three-wheeled police golf-cart chalking the wheels of cars parked on the streets, students once made up a large percentage of the tickets he wrote, but that is not the case anymore.
And the estimated $45,000 the city takes in from people who were ticketed is about the same as the expense of having Officer Charles Hurley ride around chalking and ticketing cars, and collecting on his tickets. In others words, it’s a wash.
Even if it were pure income, it wouldn’t be a big part of the city’s budget.
The $45,000 in fines is only about 0.3 percent of the city’s annual budget of $12.5 million. “My judgment is that it’s not extremely crucial,” said Lexington City Manager Jon Ellestad.
Parking is strictly enforced not to help City Hall directly, but to help business. “We don’t want people parking for long periods of time in certain parts of the downtown area because we want to keep those spaces open for people who want to go shopping downtown or who want to do business downtown,” Ellestad said.
Why doesn’t Lexington have parking meters? Ellestad said meters were used until the early 1970s when Main Street was dug up to put power lines underground and brick the sidewalks. The change was primarily for aesthetics.
“It would look far more historic without parking meters,” Ellestad said.
Ticket money goes into the city’s general fund.
Officer Hurley says he writes anywhere from 10 to 30 tickets a day for overtime parking. Tickets in Lexington range from $15 to $100.
The city will get its first public parking deck around January 2009. The deck, part of the new courthouse complex going up at Nelson and Randolph streets, will have 125 slots available to the public for free. Thirty-five of those will be for Washington & Lee University, since the deck is displacing a parking lot that has belonged to W&L and had 35 slots near the fraternity houses beyond Varner Lane. Construction may cause more parking problems, but the deck will be a big help once it is open, Hurley said.
Meanwhile, W&L has gained 22 spaces with the lot near the sorority houses as well as about 30 spots along Denny Circle by the Woods Creek Apartments. The spots on Denny Circle will be moved once the trailers next to Woods Creek are disposed of. The school also regained about 30 spaces amid the construction of Wilson Hall when it moved the train station.
Since the W&L parking improvements, Hurley has seen almost a 50 percent decrease in tickets from last year.
A driver who gets a parking ticket has seven days to pay or contest the ticket. After that, a $10 fine is added to the bill. If a ticket continues to go unpaid, two warning notices are issued before Hurley will issue a court summons.
The city of Lexington is owed somewhere between $1,800 and $2,000 in delinquent ticket fines, going back to September.
Drivers should know that if they choose to contest a ticket in court, a guilty ruling comes with a $56 court fee.
Hurley said that he writes a lot of tickets for drivers who go over their time in two-hour parking, but it’s not mainly students anymore.
“I know a lot of people like to blame students for everything, but that’s not the case,” he said.
Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.
Lead supervisor: Prof. Claudette Artwick
Reporting supervisors:
Technical supervisor: Michael Todd