Parking scofflaws will get a free pass this summer, courtesy of the cash-strapped city of Atlanta.

When the city laid off 298 workers at the beginning of May, it unceremoniously gutted the parking enforcement section of the Department of Public Works. The group, responsible for fixing parking meters, collecting meter money and writing citations for parking violations, went from 28 workers to nine in a matter of days. Instead of 20 people walking around the city writing tickets all day, they now have five.

Not surprisingly, ticket revenue plummeted. Before the layoffs, the city wrote about 13,000 tickets a month, according to Sandra Jennings, deputy commissioner of Public Works. She said the number of tickets written in May dropped to 5,000.

"Obviously the numbers that we issued are way down," she sighed.

Parking tickets brought in about $240,000 a month before the layoffs, Jennings said. After the layoffs, the figure fell to about $80,000.

The city planned to contract out parking enforcement to a private company, and sent out a call for bids in April. Five companies responded. Those bids now are being reviewed and will go before the City Council for approval. Jennings said the company that gets the job would not be able to start until August at the earliest.

So for the next three months, the chances of getting a parking ticket in Atlanta have dropped considerably — Jennings reluctantly estimates about 66 percent.

And what about the city coffers, now facing a deficit of tens of millions of dollars? Atlanta will miss out on roughly $640,000 in citation revenue from parking desperados.

Jennings said the department has studied where most tickets were being written and has moved its remaining five people to work those areas. She said police officers also have the authority to write parking citations. "So it really won't be that much of a field day," she insisted.

Pressed on why the city wiped out a revenue-generating department before getting a private company lined up to replace it, Jennings did not have a clear answer.

"We're certainly going to try to make this time frame [without substantial parking enforcement] as short as possible," she said.