Car parked in the same spot since April has gathered $8,660 in tickets

ST. LOUIS (KSDK) - An abandoned car in St. Louis has become something of an accidental monument to bureaucratic paralysis and governmental dysfunction.

It has been ticketed dozens of times and it has not been moved in nine months. The officials responsible for moving it cannot agree on whose job that is.

Les Sterman lives in the area.

“This vehicle has been here, I believe, since last April. It has accumulated as of yesterday $8,660 worth of parking tickets,” he said.

One ticket will cost you $20.

St. Louis Deputy Treasurer Adam Layne said the city thought about restarting booting and towing.

When corruption rocked the tow lot in 2018, the treasurer took the boots off, and when the pandemic came, the boots never went back on.

“We wanted to give folks a nice window of time to be able to navigate the pandemic, but also not have their cars towed if they were in tough financial times,” Layne said.

Eight years of work is piling up while the boots sit in a city locker. The number of cars eligible for a boot in St. Louis grows larger every day.

Layne said the last time he looked at the list of vehicles eligible for a boot, it was about 40,000.

The city has 30 boots.

“You can almost go block by block and you can find an abandoned car,” Sterman said. “Why keep ticketing cars to the tune of over $8,000 when it’s clear that it’s not going anywhere?”

Sterman said he has called City Hall to complain, but cars still sit there.

When asked if he had an estimate of how much revenue is sitting on the streets, Layne’s projection was quite the number.

“It’s in the millions. I would say in the millions of dollars,” he said.

Most of the money, however, the city will likely never collect.

Some cars are worth less than the fines attached to them, and seizing and selling the vehicles at auction often only brings in a fraction of the balance owed.

“Let’s say you, just as an example, I have a car that might be worth $5,000. I got $10,000 worth of tickets. Probably not gonna show up to the lot,” Layne said.

When asked who is responsible for clearing the streets, Layne said the city is not booting vehicles because of “capacity.”

City statutes give the treasurer’s office power to write tickets and apply boots. The tow trucks come from the streets department.

As far as abandoned vehicles, St. Louis Operations Chief Sean Hadley monitors a heat map of complaints.

“There’s 375 in it right now,” Hadley said.

Those are the vehicles that need to be inspected.

Five inspectors cover a workload meant for 12 people.

The inspectors do not write tickets, but do put a sticker on the vehicle. If it’s still there six days later, it is supposed to be towed.

“It’s not a broken system. It’s just we don’t have the manpower,” Hadley said.

While he would like to hire three more drivers and seven more inspectors, Hadley said the tow lot itself has plenty of room.

Layne said he is committed to resuming booting vehicles and referring them to the streets department for a tow.

The streets department has committed enough manpower to tow up to 20 cars a day.

Sterman said if he walks past a certain intersection and sees an empty parking lot, he might not believe his eyes, but he might start to believe in his city again.

“Just basic law enforcement functions that people expect out of their local government. And when that doesn’t happen, I think it undermines faith in government and faith in the city,” he said.