If you have more than $30 worth of city of Eugene parking tickets, watch out: You might get the boot.
City of Eugene parking attendants are authorized to attach a boot, a restrictive metal device, to the front wheel of any vehicle with $30 or more of outstanding parking tickets, and some people have noticed an increase in bootings around campus.
Wednesday afternoon, four cars within two blocks of the 11th Avenue and Kincaid Street intersection had a boot attached to a front wheel and a neon-green warning sticker placed on the windshield.
Pam Guthrie, a Lane Transit District bus driver, said that recently, several people rode her bus because their cars were booted.
“I had one lady come running up and tell me, ‘My car’s been booted, and I have to be downtown before City Hall closes in 10 minutes, or they’ll tow my car,’” Guthrie said. “I had to tell her, ‘Sorry, you’re not going to make it by then.’”
Guthrie said that she has noticed significantly more instances of bootings in the last two weeks than usual.
Any increase in the number of bootings is coincidental, however, according to Kay Kronholm, the parking enforcement program director for the City of Eugene.
“There is no crackdown,” she said. “There’s the potential for [bootings] on a daily basis. Sometimes [vehicles with outstanding parking tickets] are everywhere, and sometimes you couldn’t find one if you worked all day.”
The recent number of bootings may be due to the discretion given to parking attendants, Kronholm said. The first duty of an attendant is to check the assigned patrol route for illegally parked vehicles. If they finish a route early, however, attendants are encouraged to run a background check for each car along the route, searching for outstanding tickets, Kronholm said.
When ticketing a vehicle or performing a background check, an attendant enters the vehicle’s license number in a hand-held computer. If the vehicle has more than $30 worth of outstanding tickets, a beep will alert the attendant the vehicle has outstanding tickets.
If the attendant confirms any outstanding tickets, the vehicle is booted.
To have a boot removed, all outstanding tickets — along with a $40 boot removal fee — must be paid within 24 hours.
Last fiscal year Eugene parking enforcement booted 1,969 vehicles, said Charlene Mauch, operations manager for Eugene Municipal Court.
The city’s parking enforcement maintains three patrol routes around campus and four downtown. They do not patrol the University lots, however. Those lots are patrolled by the Department of Public Safety.
DPS and the city use similar parking enforcement systems. If a vehicle is ticketed, its license number is entered into a hand-held computer, which will alert a DPS officer if the vehicle has outstanding parking tickets. Like the city, DPS officers are required to double-check before booting a car, according to Rand Stamm, the University’s parking and transportation manager.
But unlike the city, DPS usually doesn’t boot vehicles until they have five or more outstanding parking tickets.
Also unlike the city, DPS officers do not generally run checks on legally parked cars.
“Basically, we would only boot them if they’re in violation,” Stamm said.