Dear Editor,
Imagine my surprise and confusion when notified by the Bursars Office that I had accumulated $130 in unpaid parking tickets! Surprise and confusion because I have no unpaid parking tickets. I trotted down to the “Parking Services” office and provided my vehicle description and plate number and was told it was not my car that was ticketed. However, the license plate of the offending vehicle was run through DMV and came back with a former address of mine. (I have not lived there in more than a year!)
According to “parking policy” I am responsible for the tickets regardless of the fact that it was not my vehicle and I did not commit the offenses. After two months of attempting to resolve the issue with an uncooperative “Parking Services” manager, to get a copy of the tickets, the license plate number and vehicle description, I appealed … and lost. Extremely upset, I asked again for the pertinent information from the tickets, and the vehicle plate number. This time the Parking Services manager agreed to provide what I had been asking for for two months! According to the committee members this may not be a fair policy (to attribute tickets based on an address – the address and vehicle are allegedly registered to my daughter-in-law I found out later – more about that in a minute) but it is policy. Imagine that?! Being the “never-take-anything-anyone-tells-you-as-gospel” type of student, I looked up “parking policy.” There is no written policy that I can find that attributing tickets based on old student addresses is practiced on our campus, let alone, legally practiced. I was told by Parking Services that “it is the students job to police friends and family members on campus and this makes you [the student] responsible for the tickets.”
As it turns out, the vehicle in question was traded in to a local dealer Sept. 13, 2008 for a Honda Civic. Six weeks later, the dealer illegally registered the traded-in vehicle in my daughter-in-law’s name. (A dealer who, facing fraud and tax evasion charges from the IRS, fled to Georgia!) Now there is a vehicle out there that my daughter-in-law is not in possession of, that if it is involved in any type of crime, drugs, an accident, red light ticket, she will be responsible for. All of the agencies are sympathetic but advise the only course of action is to hire an attorney!
In this economy who has extra cash for attorney fees, let alone court costs? Where does this leave me? In legal limbo apparently. I do not have $130 to pay the tickets, and if I did, I would not pay them on the principle that I did not park illegally. In the meantime, I cannot get my diploma after graduation, nor can I register for my grad school classes in the fall unless I cave in and pay the fines. I am an innocent victim in a rotten system.
-Kelley Hatch-Draper

Author