Judge: Threatening letters sent for overturned Atlanta parking tickets

“I do not think it is in [the company’s] best interest to continue its improper practice of issuing threatening collection letters.”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE OF THIS ISSUE

In the months that followed the email, officials from the court and company talked in circles about how to correct what seemed to be the problem’s root: a lack of integration between computer software, according to documents reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

To this day, the problem remains unresolved. And multiple drivers recently told the AJC that the issue extends further, saying they have been subject to collection efforts even after paying their fines in court.

In 2018 and 2019, about 30 percent of the 6,353 parking tickets adjudicated in Municipal Court were dismissed.

Company officials declined to answer questions about their collection practices, referring all questions to the city.

ATL Plus is operated by Chicago-base SP Plus, a company with roughly 23,900 employees that provides parking management services for large cities throughout the nation, including Chicago, Denver and New Orleans.

A spokesman for Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms also declined to comment, and the city has yet to turn over documents the AJC requested Feb. 10, seeking the number of tickets issued by ATL Plus since the five-year contract took effect in 2017; collection letters sent to ticket recipients; and monthly audits required by the contract that gauge the accuracy of the citations issued.

Victor E. Hartman, an Atlanta attorney and former FBI agent who authored the book “The Honest Truth About Fraud,” told the AJC that attempts at collecting fines that are not owed could potentially be criminal.

“If the company was clearly put on notice that a percentage of their collections were not valid, then the feds could charge mail and/or wire fraud,” Hartman said. “If this were a widespread scheme and the internal actors knew it and personally benefited, this might get the attention of of the United States Attorney’s Office.”

Apparently, it has.

In a January email, an FBI agent sought an appointment with Jackson after being told the judge “might have some information in regards to ATL Plus.” The U.S. Attorneys Office has been investigating City Hall corruption since 2015, but it is not clear if parking enforcement is part of that probe.

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak referred a reporter to the FBI, who did not immediately comment.

Mitch Bierman, a Miami-based attorney with expertise in government affairs and administrative law, said ATL Plus collection efforts could expose the company to lawsuits under the federal Fair Debt Collections Practices Act.

“Collecting a debt that is not owed is a violation,” said Bierman, the managing director for Weiss Serota Helfman Cole & Bierman’s Miami-Dade office.

‘I think that they are knowingly violating the law’

Alisa Aczel, an attorney who specializes in corporate restructuring and post judgment collections, said she has personally been caught up in the system and thinks there is more to it than a computer glitch.

Aczel said she was visiting her dentist in June when she received a $35 ticket for allowing her meter to expire.

She appealed, but the company upheld the validity of the ticket. Aczel said company officials then told her the dispute was being transferred to Municipal Court and she would be notified of a date to appear.

In late October, Aczel said, ATL Plus sent her a letter claiming the original fine was uncontested and that she owed $95.

After calling the court, Aczel said she was told her hearing was Oct. 4 and that she was listed as a failure to appear — although court officials could not provide information about the attempts to notify her of the date. A court employee told her she could pay $35 over the phone to take care of the citation, which she did partly out of concern about having a failure to appear on her record, according to Aczel.

But the ordeal wasn’t over.

Aczel received another collections notice in January claiming that she still owed $95 for the June citation. She complained to Jeffrey McGirt, SP Plus’ public safety enforcement manager.

“When a citation (ticket) is disputed to court, it is dismissed from our system and forwarded to the Atlanta Municipal Court for disposition,” McGirt wrote in an email. “Once there the adjudication process is on their end as we have no input or access to the court tickets.”

He didn’t explain why the collection agency had demanded a payment that Aczel no longer owed.

“I expect for the government to be incompetent,” Aczel said. “I think this is an extremely different situation here … They were clearly trying to get me to pay more than I owed.

“I think that they are knowingly violating the law.”

Aczel isn’t alone.

The AJC spoke to eight people with various complaints, including a city employee whose car was booted after her citations were dismissed in court. For this story, the newspaper also reviewed 45 written complaints and hundreds of pages of documents.

Kayla Teasley provided the AJC with a picture of a bank statement showing that she paid a $50 citation on Dec. 19, 2019 — ten days after it was issued. Yet ATL Plus sent her a letter dated Jan. 28 stating that she still owed the money.

Last year, the Better Business Bureau gave ATL Plus a rare "F" rating based on complaints it has received. One person complained to the BBB, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing marketplace trust, that collection efforts continued even after they paid their ticket twice.

“I paid a ticket months ago and I keep getting letters to my house,” according to a complaint filed in May. “I paid it again, but the balance was not updated … I keep getting letters to my house … I honestly don’t know what to do here.”

Reed: A new era of parking enforcement

Over-zealous parking enforcement has frustrated Atlantans for a decade.

Ever since Mayor Shirley Franklin privatized the city’s parking enforcement in late 2009, residents have grumbled about being unfairly targeted by over-zealous enforcement, and being unable to appeal tickets.

The former enforcement contractor was ParkAtlanta, a subsidiary of Wisconsin-based Duncan Solutions. That contract guaranteed the city $5.5 million a year in revenue from fines, and the number of parking citations skyrocketed. One year, the company issued more than 200,000 citations.

Mayor Kasim Reed's signed a new contract with ATL Plus that assured the city even more money — $7 million per year. Reed said the contract would usher in a new era for what had been a source of public outrage.

But there appears to be no solution in sight.

Atlanta municipal court Chief Judge Christoper Portis told the AJC on Tuesday that the integration between ATL Plus and court computers has yet to occur. It was proving more difficult than expected, he said.

In emails, his colleague, Judge Jackson, continued to complain about the matter.

“Will this ever be done?” Jackson asked in June.

A company employee responded that the municipal court’s administrator had told her that “there were more pressing vendor integrations.”

“Thus, ATL Plus will be one of the last vendors to be integrated into the municipal court system,” wrote company manager Natasha Labi.

“We seem to be the forgotten stepchild and the public parkers and the court staff suffer,” Jackson wrote in response.

Then in an email late last month, he appeared to have given up hope.

“This issue apparently will never be resolved,” Jackson wrote.

WHY IT MATTERS

Anyone who parks in a parking space owned by the city of Atlanta could be subject to enforcement efforts many call predatory and potentially fraudulent. The city and its private parking contractor have failed to address problems months after they were alerted to them by a Municipal Court judge.