Clarendon Hills has sold more than 300 additional vehicle stickers and collected more than $17,500 in additional revenue in about two weeks, since sending out more than 800 letters to households identified as not having purchased a sticker in 2017.
“Almost everyone living in a single-family homes here has at least one car,” village manager Kevin Barr said. “We ran the list of homes that had not purchased a sticker against our water bill list — everyone gets water — to determine who would get a letter about the vehicle stickers.”
Barr said the annual vehicle stickers expire June 30 of each year. The regular cost is $40, however, there is a 50 percent discount for seniors, and stickers purchased after July 31 cost $60. Motorcycles cost $30.
“It’s difficult to enforce because you can’t go into people’s garages to see if they have a sticker,” Barr said. “Our police can, and do, check in parking lots, but most of our single-family homes, which make up most of the housing here, have garages.”
Clarendon Hills police wrote about 350 tickets in 2016 and 300 in 2015 for failure to display a vehicle sticker, police said. The fine is $25 and escalates if not paid within 30 days.
Barr said Clarendon Hills has generated as much as $180,000 annually from the sale of vehicle stickers.
“We noticed a bit of a downtick; we were down to about $160,000 last year,” he said. “Sometimes, people didn’t know, or they forgot to purchase a sticker. It’s about revenue, but it’s also about fairness. The majority of our residents purchase a vehicle sticker, so it’s not fair to them to have people who don’t.”
Maureen Potempa, the village’s finance manager, said about $132,800 had been collected this year for vehicle sticker sales prior to the letter being sent out. Clarendon Hills has about 2,500 homes, Barr said.
Barr said the village plans to next year start using a third-party vendor to handle vehicle stickers.
“We do our best now to let people know about this, but we think it will work better with an outside vendor,” he said. “Now, we send out blank forms that people have to fill out. The outside vendor will have full records and be able to send out forms with information already on there. People will only have to make any needed changes.”
Twitter @chuckwriting
