By Carol Tannenhauser
One day after Mayor Eric Adams’ budget director, Jacques Jiha, instructed most city agencies to slash their budgets by 4%—even if it means cutting essential services, the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) issued a report suggesting another way to meet funding shortages — collect from scofflaws who owe the city at least $2.1 billion in back fines and fees.
“Jiha should unearth every available dime before telling agencies to make cuts,” said Upper West Side City Councilmember Gale Brewer, who initiated the report. “An extra $2.1 billion would go a long way toward funding legal service providers, keeping libraries open, and baselining critical positions at oversight agencies.”
IBO found the unpaid balances, incurred from 2017 through 2022, in three areas: parking and traffic camera violations ($1 billion), real property charges ($150 million), and penalties issued by the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings ($940 million), according to a press release. OATH handles various public safety and quality of life violations, such as uncleaned sidewalks, illegal posting of handbills, and residential recycling violations.
“These three measures are by no means exhaustive and are likely an undercount of the total amount of debt that the city is owed,” IBO Director Louisa Chafee wrote in a letter to Brewer.
“City Hall is leaving billions on the table while slashing services and shrinking the municipal workforce. Cutting jobs at revenue-generating agencies will result in even more uncollected cash,” said Brewer, who outlined her concerns on municipal staffing in a March 27 letter to Jiha.
I am so fed up with officials who cannot or will not enforce the law, leaving the population as a whole to suffer.
Dumb. Comparing a one time cash inflow to an ongoing expense. Budget cuts are required. There’s far more “stealing” built into the spending than there is in uncollected debts.
Btw – how much of that debt is likely to be paid? How much would it cost to collect? And what can the city do to enforce collections? If Brewer has some ideas on how to actually collect (e.g., threaten jail time for people with unpaid fines), I’d be interested.
Instead, she’s another all talk politician.
Uncollected fees and fines, assuming collection continues, would not be a one time revenue stream.
However, collection costs monies and labor.
“Budget cuts are required”….to the police department. Not basic services.
Going after them and enforcing the collection of fines does more than just go after uncollected debt, it also sends a message that the city is paying attention again and will not tolerate scofflaws. We need to get back to having and enforcing rules and going after those with unpaid fines is a good start. Enforce street and sidewalk cleaning riles, start ticketing car and then booting and towing them if tickets go unpaid. My dream is to find a way to track down people who don’t pick up their dogs poop and fine them. They are the worst.
There is a community that does not allow dogs unless they are registered along with their DNA. So when excrement is found left it is tested and a fine is automatically sent to the owner (not the dog walker). I believe the first offense was $400.
Brilliant! NYC could collect millions doing this, as there is no shortage of dog excrement.
Sad but true. One must ask, “How did we get here?”. Obviously the collection process has totally broken down. If fines are not being collected, why bother with summons?
On a related topic, definitely tired of paying my bus and subway fare – while so many don’t.
And tolls to come in and out of the city when I see so many obscured/defaced plates. Police should be able to pull a car over on that basis alone and there should be a significant fine for such evasion.
Agree, I see 2-3 defaced/obscured/fake license plates a day just walking my kids to school, would be great if NYPD cared about enforcing the law
Gale, that means arresting and charging many of your constituents for crimes and having them pay their fees instead of being let go with no bail.
No, it doesn’t. Their vehicles should be seized and sold to cover the fine balances (>$1k). Arrest is not necessary . If they ever go across an MTA bridge, the MTA police should notify NYPD who should sit on the bridge and impound cars all day. If they did this for a month (and publicized it), the problem would go away.
The excess proceeds from vehicle sales should go into the NYPD parking enforcement.
Uncollected or uncollectable? A big difference.
Uncollectable are cars from states without reciprocity, and cars with covered and defaced plates.
As to uncollected? The City let the Manhattan tow pound go with no real effort to replace it (the Harlem Fairway lot was readily available, btw). Tow trucks have all but disappeared from the place they’re needed most.
When a car is seen in violation, with a history of unpaid tickets, they used to tow them.
Put the trucks back on the street. Tow and boot. And if the plate is missing, covered, or defaced, ticket and tow.
Remember when we were piling on the city last week for the arbitrary ticket it handed out for an allegedly counterfeit state inspection sticker?
Maybe we should be more skeptical about how valid all of these unpaid/uncollected tickets are.
To play devil’s advocate….the allegedly counterfeit sticker dilemma could have been avoided if the company that replaced the windshield had informed the car owner that the sticker would be useless after removing it. The enforcement process worked the way it’s supposed to in the greater scheme of the fraud perpetuated by many with stickers. Fingers should be pointed at the installer rather than the City for writing that ticket.
I appreciate trying to avoid cutting things, but I wish I had more confidence that our elected officials understood money.
There’s a cost to collecting these funds. While the city should vigorously pursue collection, it’s not always possible. If a tourist got a ticket for drinking in public then left town, it’s probably not economically worthwhile to collect from them. The actual collectable amount is lower than $2.1B.
But even if the entire $2.1B is collected, that’s a one-time event. We can’t keep building permanent structural obligations into our budget based on one-time cash infusions. That’s the kind of fiscal nonsense that got us into trouble decades ago.
Our city budget is almost as large as the budget for the entire state of Florida, with only 40% of the population. The budget is too large and not sustainable. Elected officials need to be leaders: prioritize and economize.
Is it legitimate to compare a city budget to a state budget? How does the NYC budget compare to that of, say, Miami?
The absurdity is the purpose of the comparison. NYC has a budget of $100M with 8M residents. The entire state of Florida has a budget of $114B for 24M residents.
I think you meant NYC budget is $100 BILLION.
Florida is a state so it doesn’t provide services like schools, fire protection, etc. the way the city does on a local level. There’s a whole other level of government under the state level in Florida that spends plenty of money too.
More relevant is how their budgets stack up with their respective economic outputs. NYC has a larger output — roughly $1 trillion in GDP for the city versus roughly $940 billion in GDP for all of Florida — meaning the city is arguably more efficient with its budget. We spend less and generate more.
Beyond the fact that it’s really difficult to calculate the gdp of a region or state, it doesn’t add up that a government budget is reasonable for the totality of a regional gross domestic product.
Government is a component of GDP. The only place where government spending is the totality of GDP is North Korea.
I think you misunderstand what I said.
If you think of a government budget as what it costs that government to run its economy, my claim was that NYC spends less than Florida, both in absolute and proportional terms.
In your earlier post, by contrast, you were comparing per-capita expenditures, which gave the impression that NYC was somehow much less efficient with its city budget.
But what matters with spending is what you get with it: in NYC’s case, you get a city government that is responsible for administering a larger economy.
DeBlasio ballooned the city payroll through the roof. I am sure many city employees are not necessary.
I think Adams has lots of his crony pals on the payroll as well
That’s a picayune point that deflects from the main issue. Adams’ having a handful of friends on the payroll mean nothing compared to the bloated roster of unproductive NYC employees. Just look around you at every level of City government where the public interfaces with employees and you’ll find serious deficiencies compared to interactions with private company employees who have to meet certain standards of efficiency and results.
So many of these fines are harassment fines of small businesses and small landlords. I own a small business and small building and the city is always finding a new way to fine us sometimes thousands of dollars for tiny violations and the amount of regulations get more and more onerous every year.
Jean –
Around Wall Street/FiDi people regularly leave trash bags on the sidewalk – and
then small businesses get blamed.
Failure or unwillingness to enforce laws leads to increasing contempt for laws and law. Is it still true that turnstile jumpers are not arrested or charged? Almost every day I see that subway trains are delayed because of a vandalized train or the NYPD summoned because of disorderly persons on a train or at a station. Doesn’t condoning fare evasion “teach” that laws are to be ignored at one’s convenience?
Ditto for collection of moneys owed. Shocking that cars parked in violation are not towed anymore.
It could be worse. The UWS could be Chicago. https://www.city-journal.org/chicagos-hard-left-choice
Hey, the cops could do their job and fine/seize most of the unlicensed gasoline scooters (small motorcycles in use).
Some parties would pay to have the illegal machines returned, just to sell them to an out of state cousin.
Seize vehicles and other items. Close restaurants. Seize buildings. Simple solutions.
$1 billion in unpaid parking & red light camera fees? A good portion of that figure is from cars owned by NYers but registered in states with which we have no reciprocal collection agreements. RESIDENT ONLY PARKING would force many , if not most, of these NYS DMV violators to register their cars here. Then, they would be unable to renew their registrations before paying all outstanding summoned. ANOTHER REASON FOR RESIDENT ONLY PARKING.
I doubt that’s accurate. The percentage of vehicles from non-reciprocity states is likely minimal compared to those that are in neighboring reciprocity states. Booting should be used for cars that are from non-reciprocity states and would take care of that problem.
Liberal democrats like Gail Brewer need to make up their minds.
City stopped lien sales when law authorizing expired last year and majority of city council and others have shown no interest or desire in reauthorizing all in great name of “equality”.
https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11339-city-council-nyc-tax-lien-sale-end
Thank you for highlighting this B.B. What a mistake.
NYC should be putting a black mark on the credit report of every driver who has unpaid tickets. This is not being done now (to my knowledge) and it seems like an obvious and effective way to get traction. We could also suspend licenses for those with unpaid tickets and refuse to renew registrations. Simple and fair.
Great – how can we get them to do this? Obviously, they are dragging their leaden feet!
I don’t recall how they did it, but as the City of Philadelphia’s finances were weakening, they placed a major focus on collecting unpaid bills. I believe they made significant progress which helped to improve their situation. Perhaps give them a call for some ideas?
And the migrants are costing how much?
I made a very reasonable suggestion that the homeless who are capable of working should be asked to work on collections in exchange for their free housing. I am not sure why this got censored. It might have been slightly over 100 words, but I see at least one other post in this thread that is clearly over 100 words, so this policy is not being applied consistently. I do not think it was an extremist perspective.
WSR does a lot of excellent reporting, but your comment moderation leaves a lot to be desired.
What a great idea, Leon. The debt collection industry is huge and this would be an excellent introduction to something with career potential.
To those who say the NYPD should do this or that, the subject is the budget and revenue The NYPD nor should any Law Enforcement be used to generate revenue for the city.
Breakdown by source of unpaid debts.
https://www.amny.com/news/new-yorkers-owe-at-least-2-1-billion-in-unpaid-fines-to-the-city-here-the-areas-racking-up-the-most-fines/
Please collect what you can and give it to the NY public libraries. They are facing 52.7 million in funding cuts.
Those of you who are concerned, please go to the NYPL website & sign the letter demanding that the funding be restored.