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James Trotter is a parking ticket magnet.
He used to rack them up in bunches near his old downtown Omaha apartment, sometimes getting a couple of tickets in a single day.
He still gets them in Elmwood Park when he goes to class at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
In all, Trotter collected 26 parking violations during 2009, the third most for a single vehicle, according to a World-Herald study of more than 122,000 tickets issued by the City of Omaha.
“At least I get a bronze medal,” Trotter said with a laugh. “I'm the third-biggest loser in this debacle.”
Trotter's ticket record may be Olympian, but he's far from alone in getting parking tickets.
More than 42,000 individuals found orange ticket envelopes under their windshield wipers last year, and at least 8,800 of them got more than one.
With only about one in three tickets paid on time, the Omaha City Council recently approved a $20 late fee. The fee, which takes effect March 18, will kick in if the ticket isn't paid within 30 days.
The top spots and times for parking tickets, based on a World-Herald examination of tickets issued during the past two years:
>> In the Old Market and near the Douglas County Courthouse and City-County Building.
>> Around lunchtime, particularly from 12:45 p.m. to 1 p.m.
But tickets are written throughout the day and all over the city.
The city now has 4.5 employees assigned to parking enforcement. Todd Pfitzer, city traffic engineer, said the city added a worker this year because meters were installed in the Midtown Crossing area.
Those employees don't write tickets all day, every day. They place meters in new locations, repair and repaint existing ones and get tapped for other city tasks, such as driving snowplows. In fact, the city's ticket totals plunged sharply last December because of two major snowstorms.
On a typical workday, a total of about 240 tickets are written by the city workers and police officers. Pfitzer said there are no quotas, but The World-Herald found that most individual ticket-writers doled out at least 50 tickets a day and often more.
Last June, a city employee wrote 127 tickets — the most written downtown in a single day during the past two years. (Overall, however, the record was 146 tickets issued by another ticket-writer who swept through Elmwood Park last August in a crackdown on illegal parking near UNO.)
City officials refused to reveal the name of the top downtown ticket writer, identified in the data by a code number. An interactive feature on Omaha.com offers a look at the employee's busy day.
Pfitzer said workers can't check every meter repeatedly during the day. But they try to change their routes, he said, so people can't count on letting certain meters expire at certain times.
Courthouse-area meters were hot spots for tickets — nearly every meter on Farnam Street in front of the courthouse had more than 100 tickets.
The Old Market is another hot spot. At least 24,000 tickets were issued during the two years in the area roughly bounded by Harney, Jackson, 10th and 13th Streets.
About half of the Old Market tickets were written from noon to 2 p.m.
“People do get tickets,” said Carl Ashford, owner of Jackson St. Booksellers. “It puts us at a great disadvantage to the malls and places where you can park for free.”
Ashford said parking is a big issue for his customers. People prefer to park at meters, he said, rather than pay more at a nearby city lot. But if they overstay their paid time, he said, the city's ticket writers “lay in wait. And they just hammer people.”
Pfitzer said the city's enforcement efforts in the Old Market help ensure a supply of open parking spaces for a steady stream of visitors rather than letting a handful of all-day parkers monopolize the spaces.
“The Old Market folks need parking turnover,” Pfitzer said.
Perhaps the most ticket-crazy strip is the west side of 19th Street, just across from the City-County Building.
That one-way street between Harney and Farnam Streets accounted for more than 1,600 tickets in the past two years. Six of the meters on that street ranked in the city's top eight.
About one-third of the tickets on the block were written after 4 p.m., when parking is banned to provide an extra turning lane for rush-hour traffic.
Trotter, the UNO student who ranked third in last year's ticket list, thinks Omaha's parking situation is “awful.”
The majority of his tickets were near his apartment on the south edge of downtown. The Air Force veteran thought it was “ridiculously expensive” to rent a space in his building's paid lot, so he found on-street parking when he got home at night.
But he'd wind up with a ticket the next morning if he didn't move his 1989 Ford Bronco in time.
In hindsight, he agreed, it would have been cheaper to pay for the lot. He has since moved to another apartment with better parking options.
The tickets that really bother Trotter are the ones he's received near UNO, where parking options are limited and the enforcement is strict. He said he got one ticket when his car's bumper was just a little past the no-parking sign on a side street.
“Why issue a ticket if it's not a safety hazard?” he said.
Besides his 26 parking tickets, he also picked up four tickets for expired plates.
Those added up to a painful $480 in fines. Trotter has paid all but one — impressive when considering that about 40 percent of Omaha's tickets go unpaid.
“I'm not an upstanding citizen,” Trotter said. “I pay my tickets off so my car doesn't get towed.”
World-Herald staff writer Maggie O'Brien contributed to this report.
Contact the writer:
444-1114, paul.goodsell@owh.com
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