Sometimes you get lucky
An error at the top of its police department could cost Seattle around $5 million — and get you out of your recent Capitol Hill parking tickets.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office announced the monumental mix-up this week, saying some 200,000 parking tickets must be refunded or voided because Seattle Police and Chief Adrian Diaz failed to properly commission parking enforcement officers after they were transferred out of the department in a Seattle City Council maneuver to downsize policing in the city:
On August 16, 2021, Council Bill 120148 was passed unanimously by the City Council and signed on August 18, 2021, officially moving PEOs from SPD to SDOT. Council intended special commissions to be issued for City employees who were not within SPD to enforce certain aspects of the traffic code. Special commissions are issued by the Chief of Police to personnel who perform law enforcement responsibilities outside of SPD. This technical step was not taken immediately upon PEOs’ relocation to SDOT in 2021.
The Harrell administration says it discovered the error and had Diaz commission the officers under their new wing in the Seattle Department of Transportation.
The city says tickets issued between September 1, 2021 and April 5th during the period before the correction are now void.
Sometimes you don’t
Refunds will be returned to approximately 100,000 individuals who received and paid for parking tickets during this period, the city says, while an additional 100,000 ticket recipients who have not yet paid will be voided.
Refunds to those impacted are set to begin the week of June 6. In line for a refund? You can visit seattle.gov/parking-ticket-refunds to look up your ticket. The city will also mail notifications about the refund situation adding more cost to repairing the situation.
After months of pandemic restrictions and lowered parking costs, the city has started jacking up on-street parking rates across Capitol Hill and the rest of Seattle though hourly rates remain far below previous highs.
Meanwhile, the screw-up doesn’t seem likely to affect Diaz’s hopes of remaining as police chief. A search has begun for candidates for the job led by Harrell’s 14-member search committee.
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‘Jacking up’ seems a bit sensationalist, they’re simply working to bring them back up to same rates as BeforeTimes.
Weird. On one hand it sounds like a clerical error that we should just wave off – everything about these tickets is aboveboard except the paperwork. On the other, if we can’t trust the city and SPD to dot their i’s and cross their t’s, accountability suffers.
No doubt people will blame this $5M charge on the “defund the police” movement, even though it’s a perfectly good example of decoupling non-police tasks from the police infrastructure – that the existing, overburdened and overly complex police organization failed to implement correctly.
How can the acab/defund movement not be partially responsible here? It was their complaining that led the city council to this pointless change. There was no issue having them under SPD but we did this to make people feel good while costing a ton more money. Classic Seattle.
A $5 million dollar tax hit that was a direct result of the Defund movement and Council’s knee jerk reaction and performative progressive dance.
lol above board except for the paperwork? its clearly a $5m failure of the defund crew, one of many…