An abandoned Acura MDX in St. Louis, Missouri, has accumulated $8,660 in parking tickets. It never gets booted, and nobody will tow it. It has just been sitting there on Locust Street since last April, racking up fines. What is going on?
A big part of the problem is that the City of St. Louis has 40,000 cars eligible for towing. It owns just 30 boots.
As Adam Layne, the city’s treasurer, tells KSDK News, there are millions of dollars in unpaid parking tickets sitting on St. Louis streets, and most of it will never be collected.
Residents want the cars removed, or at least the tickets to be paid
This has got some residents, including Les Sterman, who lives a block away from the Acura, rather upset.
“Why keep ticketing cars to the tune of over $8,000 when it’s clear that it’s not going anywhere?” he said.
“It’s absolutely these kinds of things that contribute to people’s attitude about the city of St. Louis and downtown in particular,” Sterman added. “Whether it’s abandoned or unlicensed cars or speeding cars, just basic law enforcement functions that people expect out of their local government. And when that doesn’t happen, I think it undermines faith in government and faith in the city.”
The parking problems began during the pandemic
Layne says the city wanted to give people “a nice window of time” to deal with the pandemic – six years ago – so they stopped cracking down on parking tickets.
Now, according to Sean Hadley, the Streets Department operations chief, he has 375 cars on a map of abandoned car complaints. He’s got five inspectors. If an inspector tags a car as abandoned, it is supposed to be towed within six days. That hasn’t been happening.
Layne says the city’s tow lot is full. Hadley says it holds 1,200 cars. However, when KSDK News visited the lot recently, there were maybe 700 cars parked in it.
“We’re not at capacity,” said Hadley. “We need people. When you say a capacity issue, the lot itself is not full. I mean, we can handle cars.”