Concord residents with outstanding parking tickets may be required to pay their fines before registering their cars.
That’s if the city’s parking committee ultimately recommends that proposal, which its members discussed and supported Thursday. They plan to present their draft recommendations at the city council’s December meeting.
The practice of withholding vehicle registrations for unpaid parking tickets is already in place in Manchester, Nashua, Dover and Laconia.
If Concord adopts the enabling state law, RSA 231:130-a, it would refuse to issue vehicle registrations to drivers with unpaid fines in participating cities.
The city would seek to give residents a convenient way to pay their fines and continue on with registration, committee members said.
As Concord considers ways to shore up its ailing parking fund, the parking committee members said this is an option to collect money that is already owed, as opposed to hiking parking fees and adding more meters.
“Talking about expanding the meters and doing these other things that we’ve talked about, this is in a whole other category,” City Councilor Brent Todd said. “This is money that’s really owed. There’s no question about it.”
He added: “We need to be paying attention to this to offset some of these other things that we’re looking at that we may really not want to do.”
In fiscal year 2015, about 17 percent of the tickets owed to the city went unpaid, according to a packet of information distributed to the committee. That’s slightly more than $80,000 over the year that drivers simply chose not to pay.
“There’s plenty left on the table, year after year after year,” said City Councilor Byron Champlin. “We should be doing everything that we can that’s reasonable to collect those overdue parking tickets. . . . There are scofflaws who are taking advantage of the system, so I’m in favor of changing the system so it’s more difficult to do that.”
It was suggested that, instead of a notice in the mail that registration is due, the people responsible for unpaid fees would receive a notice of their balance and a message that they’re required to renew in person.
Although, Champlin noted, the city already sends numerous reminder letters, so “it’s hard to believe they don’t know they have an overdue ticket.”
The committee’s chairman, City Councilor Mark Coen, said it’s unknown what percentage of fines are due from people who live outside Concord – and therefore wouldn’t be penalized by the change because they register in their respective towns. But at least some fines would have to be paid, he said.
The parking committee meets again next Thursday.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)