Attempt to collect on tickets act of bad faith

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/04/2016 (3781 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was early last month when a well-placed source tipped me that there was something rotten in the state of the Winnipeg Parking Authority.

By late last week that rotten-garbage-like stench was wafting through a city hall conference room where Winnipeg’s COO, Mike Jack, stood alone — like a man trying to explain the inexplicable. How the city, and then its special operating agency, spent years trying to recover fines on parking tickets it had no legal right to collect on.

Millions of dollars worth that they now acknowledge they won’t be pursuing.

That aforementioned well-placed source initially suggested what was going on in an email she sent me March 3 following a column I’d written about the WPA being caught handing out parking tickets and having vehicles towed illegally after a concert at the Burton Cummings Theatre.

“The Winnipeg Parking Authority thinks they can get away with a LOT, “ she wrote. “There is a lot going on at 373 Broadway (the place where tickets are fought) that the media should be paying attention to.”

Turned out when I followed up with a phone call she had a lot to say about the LOT going on with the WPA. Of all the inside info she shared, one story stood out.

“You’ve heard about all these parking tickets that they went back and tried to collect months ago, right?”

Yeah, vaguely. The WPA has been trying to collect on historic tickets since it was created and took over responsibility from the Winnipeg Police Service in 2009.

Last summer the WPA announced it had discovered 13,526 unpaid parking tickets dating back to between 1992 and 2000 they wanted to collect on. Another 15,800 parking tickets — apparently owed by people with wads of them — had been sent for special attention to a liens and collections company. As of mid-March, only 1,840 of those nearly 30,000 historic tickets had been paid.

Why so few? Maybe this is part of the answer.

“A bunch of them got thrown out by the JJP (Judicial Justice of the Peace) because they didn’t have the original copy of the ticket.”

And neither did the WPA.

The problem was the hard copies police retained — the “original information” — were long gone and all the WPA had was a summary of the police service’s electronic record.

There was more to the story.

It was what the WPA did after they realized they didn’t have the original information and someone dropped by The Parking Store looking to plead their case about years-old tickets they may not have seen or remember receiving.

“They would relay the charge against you,” she said, “for something that had been outside the six-month limitation period.”

She explained under the provincial Highway Traffic Act — including the city parking bylaw that’s governed by the Summary Convictions Act — the WPA has six months from the time the ticket is issued to commence prosecution.

On March 15, the WPA granted a wide-ranging telephone interview with four of its top executives, including chief operating officer Randy Topolniski and policy analyst Colin Stewart. I saved the question about the historic tickets being tossed and why, for last.

Apparently they weren’t anticipating that one.

“Is that news to you?” I asked.

“I’m unaware,” Topolniski said. “Again, I don’t get every statistic coming in.”

Although I wasn’t aware of it — but it would be hard to believe the COO of the WPA wouldn’t have been — as Mike Jack announced Friday the city and its special operating agency had known since August when a historic parking ticket was rejected by a JJP they had a problem. They had been at work with the province since then trying to fix it.

Back on the phone in mid-March I asked if the WPA was still presenting the summary of the old police electronic parking ticket records as evidence.

In this case it was a one-sided affair for the deplorably deceitful Winnipeg Parking Authority

“Yes, we do,” Colin Stewart answered.

Even though, he later acknowledged from some of the weekly summaries of court decisions, “In many cases they’re saying its been too long and I’m not going to even hear you.”

Why then, I asked, is the WPA still pursuing the collection of those tickets when it knows they are being ruled invalid?

“These are fines owing the city of Winnipeg,” Stewart answered. “The only people who can tell the Winnipeg Parking Authority to stop trying to collect is (city) council.”

I wondered why the WPA wouldn’t ask city council for that authority. Why was this not being stopped?

“I’m just trying to think of how the correct way of answering that is,” Topolniski said.

Honestly would be a good start.

I left the question of why they hadn’t stopped with pursuing the tickets — and of course the millions in fine revenue — with the COO to mull over.

Three days later, we now know the province helped the city fix its parking ticket problem with the Summary Convictions Act.

And then Friday, seven months after they should have stopped collecting fines, the city finally announced it was.

On reflection, of all Randy Topolniski’s clumsy comments in that interview last month, it was the one about the city not having had a Crown Attorney present to argue its case on historic tickets that is the most revealing.

“It’s a one sided-affair.”

That much we can agree on.

In this case it was a one-sided affair for the deplorably deceitful Winnipeg Parking Authority.

But not anymore.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca