Das Boot

Springfield police have a new weapon to get you to pay parking fines.

Here’s a dirty little secret: Until June 18, 2006, if you received a parking ticket in Springfield, you could have conceivably ripped that baby up, thrown it in the gutter and motored on your way, because it was likely nothing would happen to you. Springfield police can’t devote much manpower to locating parking-ticket offenders—it’s hard to argue they should in light of meth and child abuse statistics. It took bad luck or some other violation for that ticket to become an issue.

Police are trying to change that. With a new ordinance passed by City Council last month, the SPD can immobilize the automobiles of repeat, unpaid parking-violation offenders using a nasty little device generically known as a boot. Once a car is booted, the owner has 72 hours to pay the fines before it is towed. If you still don’t pay your fine? Once the police finish with the case (read: if they don’t find a body in the trunk), the towing company can dispose of it after 30 days. Yow.

Jeremy Kirkland, who owns a loft near the intersection of Water Street and Boonville Avenue, says parking is such an issue downtown that if he comes home after 10 p.m. on a busy night he rarely can find a spot in any of the public lots his permit allows him to use. He says the new boot ordinance will benefit him if it means fewer people parking for long periods of time in places they shouldn’t. “We get people who leave their vehicles in our parking lot way too long and those are the parking spaces we just don’t have,” Kirkland says.

Unfortunately for Kirkland and loft-dwellers like him, it appears the new boots won’t be used in the place most people agree parking changes are most needed—downtown. Under the city’s somewhat mind-boggling parking jurisdiction setup, Springfield Police Traffic Commander Lt. Bob Brown says his traffic officers don’t have much to do with Center City, since its parking enforcement is through the Urban Districts Alliance.

So where will the boots be used? Brown says primarily on city streets (Maybe where people park around Phelps Grove Park?), not in private parking lots. Several of the city’s most parking-heavy locations (think colleges and hospitals) already write their own tickets, anyway. Missouri State and Evangel universities even own their own boots and immobilize vehicles already, Brown says.

According to David Yancey, administrator for the Springfield Municipal Court, there are 5,859 outstanding parking tickets. At $25 a whack—$50 for handicap violations—that’s up to $150,000 in uncollected fees (if you assume all violators would plead or be found guilty).

For now, the boot is not in use. Brown said the department was still deciding which boot to buy: The models under consideration range in price from about $150 each to around $500 each. He says the department plans to buy four at first. Is four enough? Brown says the department is, for now, only buying enough for each of the city’s three traffic officers to carry, plus a spare.

Brown was mum on how many unpaid violations it will take for the police to boot a car. “If we put it out there that we’re going to do it at eight, someone could say ‘Oh, I’ve got seven freebies.’ The ordinance basically says ‘a’ ticket. [The limit] could be one.”

Fix that ticket!

Are you a repeat offender? There’s still time to pay up.

• If you have a copy of your ticket, you can pay at ci.springfield.mo.us/egov/municourt/. Click on the “Pay Parking Ticket Here” icon on the left side of the home page.
• If you don’t have the ticket, you’ll need to know the license plate number of the car you were driving. Visit the office physically at 625 N. Benton Ave., or call  417-864-1890.