Posted on Thu, Aug. 04, 2005
Urban Warrior | Send trash tickets on time, or forgive them!
SHE'S A city worker, so the woman who called me about a garbage ticket can understand why city sanitation officers would write her up for the trash can on her sidewalk. She keeps it there so people don't toss litter on her sidewalk, but she knows that technically, she's not supposed to do it.
What she can't understand is why they'd wait four months to mail it.
"The ticket is dated March 23rd, and I just got the notice in the mail on July 21," said the woman, who is withholding her name because she's worried that criticizing the city could cost her a job. "Why wait and send it to me four months later? If I had gotten it in a timely manner, that's one thing. But now, how am I supposed to have a chance to fight this? Who can remember four months ago?
"I feel like this ticket should just be torn up," she continued. "It's the principal of the thing."
I agree.
Because this isn't the first time I've heard a complaint like this.
There was the Brewerytown woman who got three successive tickets, all for the same violation - six months after they'd been issued.
And how about Sophie Barnard, caretaker of Grumble-
thorpe, an historic house in Germantown?
Barnard had long been upset about the tickets she kept getting, suspecting they weren't fair. But she was unable to prove it, because they always came several months late.
"Then there was the one where we got the fine five months later," Barnard told me. "At first, I couldn't figure out what was bugging me about the date, and then finally it dawned on me: I was in the hospital that day, giving birth to my second child. I couldn't possibly have put the trash out early."
For a while, it was easier to pay the fines than to fight them, said Matt Shultz, director of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, which manages Grumblethorpe.
"To take a day off to go through a court hearing, all for the sake of a $25 ticket, just didn't make sense," he said.
But then the principle of the thing nagged at him, too.
"What bothered me most is this: If the object is to get people to change their behavior, why write an anonymous ticket that arrives five months later? Why not drop a copy in the mailbox on the day that it gets written?
Shultz decided to fight the most recent ticket, and got it dismissed.
"It just seems wrong to me, to wait so long," he told me. "Someone should at least knock on the door, and let the person know right away what their violation is," he said.
Paula Weiss, executive director of the Tax Review Board and the person who is ultimately responsible for ticket disputes, agrees.
"I think it would help tremendously if they could leave the ticket in the door," Weiss said.
Weiss said the lag began growing about two years ago, when city officials stepped up enforcement and wrote more tickets - but didn't hire more people to process them.
Her office has recently cut the time from an average of five months to three, she said. But she admits that's not good enough.
"My goal is to get that down to two weeks."
City Streets Commissioner Clarena Tolson said that last year, her department wrote 47,492 tickets for trash violations, such as cans being put out before trash day or failure to keep the sidewalk free of debris.
She says the delay is due, in part, to how hard it can be to
figure out who should get the ticket.
"It requires more research than, say, a parking ticket," she said.
Sorry, but I don't buy it.
First, drivers know they got a parking ticket right away because it gets lodged under their windshield wiper. People who get trash tickets, however, get no such immediate notice. Their first clue is the day the letter comes in the mail.
That makes it even more important for the notice to come right away.
So if the city can't leave the ticket in the door, or at least send it on time, it shouldn't be mailing it at all.
I say any fine that comes five, four, three or even two months late should automatically be considered void.
It's not that I don't appreciate the crackdown on sanitation laws. We need this kind of active enforcement for quality-of-life issues like trash and litter.
But why can't we just do it right?
Luckily, City Councilman Frank DiCicco, chairman of Council's Streets and Services Committee, agrees - and said he'd investigate the problem.
"I question why this has to take so long," he said. "And I'd have to say, it doesn't seem fair."
I'll keep you posted on what he decides to do about it.
And if you're one of the 47,492 people who got tickets for trash last year?
Let me know if they were antiques by the time you go them.
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07-26-2005, 04:25 PM
Ticketed For Trash
