Village Purges Old Parking Ticket Backlog

The Village of Mineola has expunged an unknown amount of parking tickets from its records at the request of the village court, which it considers to be “uncollectable.”

“It happens very irregularly, but from time to time we do like to get rid of the old uncollectable tickets because they keep showing up as ‘uncollected’ fines when there’s very little hope in ever seeing money from them,” village clerk Joseph Scalero said at the December 21 meeting at the . The parking tickets were issued from 2000 through 2001.

The action does not cover tickets on which the village has placed liens. Liens are placed after the ticket has not been paid for a year and after the fines amass to a certain point a judgment is passed that remains until the ticket is paid. Such tickets would become collectible by the village when the individual clears up their license if they should have a motor vehicle suspension, the DMV suspends the license, or if the car is ever impounded.

“This is for people, say for a vehicle from out of state, a stolen car that got a ticket and... the owner, who’s the victim... those funds still appear on the balance sheet as ‘uncollected’ so this just gets that number down to a more accurate number,” Scalero said of the measure.

The elimination of the uncollectable tickets will not affect any of the village audits.

“We’re talking about essentially for efficiency, space, to free up space in terms of file space and just to clean house,” deputy mayor Paul Pereira said.

Scalero explained that “for any given month,” the village may have $5,000 in outstanding tickets of which about $2,000 may be uncollected.

“There’s no way we’re ever going to get money but we’re not allowed to just banish the amounts,” he said. “There’s a large number in the things that we are still pursuing. We do have people who run in here saying they’re doing a house, refinancing and they find out they had a ticket from, say, 7 years ago, it’s got $800 in fines now collected and they come running in saying ‘I’m doing a closing tomorrow and this showed up on my credit report, I need to have this satisfaction judgment,’ so they’ll pay that ticket... but those aren’t the tickets we’re talking about.”

The last purge of uncollectable tickets was done about 7 years ago “so we’re due for another one,” the village clerk said.