For Chicago’s last two progressive mayors, automobile-related tickets have proved quite the conundrum.
On the one hand, the revenue from parking overstays, speed violations in school zones, the lack of a city permit and other infractions provide revenue badly needed for righteous programs in a cash-strapped city. On the other, these fines clearly discriminate against less affluent Chicagoans because fines are standardized.
Fifty bucks is a lot more of a problem for someone living paycheck to paycheck than a person with a high salary. Worse, the former is less likely to pay that ticket, which in turn means their becoming subject to multiplying hefty penalties. In time, that can mean someone gets trapped in a swamp of debt.
So if you look at the history of tickets in Chicago, you see mayors zigzagging between making revenue plays (such as adding more speed cameras) and then lamenting the impact of fines and fees on citizens and trying to assuage their social cost.
In truth, the problem flows from a combination of far too much costly metered parking in Chicago with far longer hours of operation than most cities (a curse of the notorious parking meter privatization sale), thus bringing more violations and then penalties, and the city’s infamous reluctance to cut spending so it was not so reliant on fines and fees.
Most wise heads when it comes to municipal budgets argue that tickets should be seen as deterrents; not city ATMs.
Now comes more salt in the city’s wound.
Cook County Circuit Judge William Sullivan ruled Feb. 19 that the city had overcharged thousands of Chicago drivers between 2012 and 2022 because the city had ignored a state law limiting penalties for a violation to no more than $250, as a condition of allowing Chicago to run its own appeals process. The city ticketed multiple times for the same violation, such as the absence of a city sticker, and thus the cumulative penalties exceeded the cap. Chicago has said it may appeal the ruling.
This is no small potatoes. According to Tribune reporting, the ruling means Chicago likely is liable for $69.6 million in cash-out-the-door refunds, not to mention having to forgive nearly $100 million that’s currently listed as debt held by ticketed drivers. Not good.
In 2022, the city came into compliance, tacitly suggesting it knew the prior practice was not in compliance with state law. No doubt legal wrangling will follow, but it looks to us like this expensive taxpayer horse has bolted. The question now is what reforms are needed.
In our view, the city should be issuing more tickets, not increasing penalties so fast and so heftily, which only propel tickets to a place they should not go, but make it less likely people will pay at all.
That will mean hiring more inspectors to issue the tickets. We hear City Hall has been reluctant, and, granted, we generally advocate for smaller government payrolls. But these revenue-generating employees would more than pay for themselves.
And if Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to decrease the discriminatory aspects of ticketing, which we acknowledge, then by all means quietly unleash more of these new ticket givers into the more affluent neighborhoods of the city, where, for example, permits are routinely ignored. Reasonableness should prevail: No one wants to live in a place where you get ticketed for jumping out of your car in the wrong spot for a matter of seconds. But the law is the law.
We’ve long thought that penalties for Chicago tickets are out of whack with the actual cost of the tickets, less severe in real terms after years of inflation.
The city’s tickets collections would also improve with better incentives.
Lots of U.S. municipalities offer a 50% “discount” for tickets paid in 24 or 48 hours, a powerful incentive for the guilty to cough up immediately. That’s far more enticing than threatening a future “penalty,” even if the dollar figures don’t change. Once a massive penalty is on the ticket, many people do a risk analysis and figure it’s not worth paying at all. And this court ruling only has vindicated that strategy, to the city’s cost.
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