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City Council Approves Parking Ticket Tribunal

Perhaps the third time will be a charm for Jamestown’s parking ticket tribunal.

The City Council recently approved a resolution authorizing Mayor Sam Teresi to executive home rule legislation to establish the administrative tribunal in conjunction with bills introduced in the Senate and Assembly by Sen. Catharine Young and Assemblyman Andy Goodell. The three-member tribunal would consist of local attorneys who have been practicing law in the city for at least three years and appointed by the state Commissioner of Motor Vehicles. Parking tickets in the city are currently handled by City Court and are rarely acted upon because of the more serious criminal cases and infractions pending in City Court. The situation has snowballed to the point there are more than $400,000 in unpaid parking ticket fines waiting to be handled.

City officials have been trying for the past few years to get state approval for the parking ticket tribunal, but each time it has failed to make it through the state Legislature’s arcane procedures despite the best efforts of Young and Goodell. Teresi recently told The Post-Journal that assistance from the state Financial Restructuring Board could make the difference this time around because the state board included creating the tribunal in its action plan for the city.

It’s good to hear optimism over the future of the parking ticket tribunal, but that doesn’t mean this process doesn’t stink. Why have local government if they are unable to implement something as simple as a parking ticket tribunal? Why have local government at all if an idea is only seen as having merit when it is included in a state plan? It would seem an administrative approval is all that should be necessary to create this tribunal. It shouldn’t take an act of Congress.

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