If you want to know why this is still happening, ask the guy who parks his car illegally every weekend to go fishing. I guarantee he will be here - most likely Sunday - its supposed to be the better of the two days this weekend.

Maroon Kia - parks there all day long - never gets ticketed - yet he's the one who boot everyone else. Please - anyone - ask him. Strange, bald, hispanic man muttering under his breathe - but ask him where your refunds are and why everybody ELSE keeps getting booted.

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Yeah, with a precedent like that, corrupt elected officials might have to own up to their bad behavior.

This is a joke. This ordinance has been in effect for a far longer time than anyone is acknowledging. I have shared this info more than once on JCList. Additionally, I have made the JCPA well aware of the ordinance's existence.

Most importantly: Who do you think SIGNED the ordinance??

Isn't it a bit interesting that this ordinance is left out of the ordinances that one can view online?? It sits in a drawer in City Hall.

The JCPA has a function. That function is to be aware of and enforce ordinances related to parking. Why is it that the only solution is that the city loses or the taxpayer loses? Shouldn't the burden fall on the entity that failed to perform the very function for which it is paid???

Before anybody responds, let me say the following: I was born in Jersey City and lived here my entire life. I don't want to hear people responding by telling me that I don't realize how corrupt Jersey City is. I do -- and my opinion is that the ONLY thing that will change it is to stop expecting it and stop accepting it.

Did anything ever come of this? I had been driving a car registered to my father in NY state when I was given a boot on the first offense back in March. I would love to have my $115 back.

Most importantly... where do I sign up to get my $110 refund? With all the BS I've put up with from the JCPA (ie meters that don't work, missing signs, etc) you better believe I'll apply for it.

For the record, as I've come to understand the booting policy of the past few years, it's been mostly out of towners who've gotten boots on first offenses. Cars with JC parking stickers recieve the 3 ticket boot. I doubt most out of towners will apply for the refund or even know about it.

Real simple. Get someone in there who cares to run the PA.
Mary Spinella has been all over the city in different capacities over the years & has never done anything for the city of JC. Another person locked into the Democratic machine. Bottom line she dosen't care....... Look at her reply's to the questions???? OK mary, collect your check & go home like all the Healy cronies..... Good luck getting money back from the city people......

If I owed the city a million dollars, they'd certainly not forgive me.

If its illegal to boot a car, why is the JCPA still booting cars who over stays the 2hr parking?

I'm having a hard time getting my head around GeorgeWBush being interested in upholding laws. Must be a different GWB than the one I'm familiar with.

I don't like the answer that "It's too hard for us to pay it back" either, and that isn't what I'm condoning. I'd rather them wholesale say we f'd up we have changed the booting policy, and will now boot correctly.

You do raise an interesting point. While I don't necessarily want the Govt giving money from it's coffers, if a 3rd party did indeed profit from these illegal boots well that is something I can get behind.

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I don't think yours are off the wall either- but this was an injustice, and we're only counting the $$$$ cost- who knows how many people missed work, missed appointments, weddings, funerals, whatever, because they had to wait around for someone to come on out and remove a boot from their car that should have never been there.

It's bad enough if it's a private business doing this, but this is government, which has the power to do alot more to you than a private business does and of whom we have a reasonable expectation to be even-handed & not motivated by $$$$$.

If it had been a private business extorting, even accidentally, JC residents & visitors for $660 a day I think people would be more pissed off, even though I think government doing it personally is way worse.

For perspective- You've got 240k folks in JC. Let's assume half of em have cars, which is probably on the high side (kids, folks that take public transportation). With 9000+ apparently illegal boots over the last 5 years, that's about 7.5% of the driving population (assuming each boot went to someone never booted before). So while 5 a day doesn't seem like much, it hit a pretty good slice of our neighbors.

If the town can't track it, fine- That surprises me, but OK. It's the answer of, "It would be too hard for us to pay it back" that gets me a bit, and as I mentioned earlier, I think once folks on the council think about it a bit they'll probably change their minds. Subtracting $1,000,000 from the town's assets right now probably gives them heart palpitations, particularly in this environment so I don't fault the initial reaction, but at some point I think they'll figure out what the right thing is.

To be honest when you break it down to a scant 5 boots a day it makes it even seem more frivolous.

Your right the policy that they were enforcing was awful, needed to be changed. It has the sooner we close the books on the Booting Campaign of Terror instituted by the JCPA, the sooner all the residents can heal.

I don't think your views are off the wall. I would just hate for the repayment to interfere with other affairs that are much more pressing for our community.

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Gary, I can certainly agree with you that the $$$ will come out of the pockets of JC residents- but that's as it should be. If the cost of living in JC as it pertains to cost of government is a problem, the citizens of the city can make their own determination as to whether or not they're willing to pay for things as they are or ask their elected officials to head in another direction.

We shouldn't be balancing a budget through extortion and seizure of property, which is what a policy of "booting first" is...you won't get the use of your car until you pay up- Not just Jersey City but probably the private contractor who works the program (does JCPA do the actual booting themselves? I honestly don't know).

For a scofflaw who decides to jerk the town around, ignore tickets & court notices, and generally flips off the rules the rest of us play by, they most certainly deserve a boot, because they've proven that they cannot be counted on to discharge to their civil obligations. The only way to get their attention is to immobilize their ride.

A million dollars is alot of money. At a million bucks, we're talking about $110 ($152 boot cost - $42 ticket cost) each time. That's 9,090 booted cars over the 5 years, or 1818 a year.... 5 a day. That's pretty rough. That's alot of people who got violated, intentionally or unintentionally.

Here is the thing, we are all going to end up paying that money one way or the other through tax increases, or the next ticket that is incorrectly given.

You are right that it does send the wrong signal to the JCPA. However people have been made aware of the situation and I'm hoping that through better vigilance, and raised awareness the public will be able to react faster and nip such problems in the bud before they spiral out of control. Furthermore the director of parking says that booting is down, and I've even noticed a marked decrease in the boots I see around town. So I will naively say problem solved, let's move on to the bounty of issues that are costing us far more.

That said, if they are giving the money back I'll certainly figure out how to get my 150 bucks or whatever it was.

while I understand that it would be expensive to give this money back, I agree that letting the city keep it would just be rewarding bad behaviour. Letting the parking authority get away with such an abuse of power would just give the signal that they can get away with something like this. I, for one, can't wait to get my money back.

I can't believe the comments here re: water under the bridge- Putting aside the fact that what was happening was purely illegal, what kind of precedent are you setting? Every time the city oversteps & takes money from someone they get to keep it?

You're basically rewarding bad behavior- Of course, nobody realized it wasn't legal. It won't happen again. But we're keeping the $$$.

All of this is moot anyway- Some lawyer is putting together a class suit as we speak, I am sure. In the end it won't be anyone's choice as to what happens- The city is going to disgorge some $$$$, period, either by defending the lawsuit (and probably losing) or by cutting some checks.

Imagine for a second if you completely and innocently took an extra $1000 a month from your employer for 5 years, in a way that was completely not the employer's fault. Do you think you'd be able to simply say, "I don't have any records, sorry about that" and it's over?

My guess is the folks on the council & in the mayor's office will have some time to think about this one & change their minds- I can understand being concerned about hurting the city's finances, but what's right here seems pretty straight-forward.

Yet ONCE AGAIN the guy in charge of booting the cars is ILLEGALLY parking his car at the end of Warren while fishing for God know's what in the river. He breaks this law every weekend, where are the cops ticketing him?

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Totally agree with you. It will cost another million dollars to just find the old docs.

I actually agree with the dissenters on this one. While the booting policy is awful and way too aggressive it is water under the bridge. Refunding a million bucks to people booted 4 years ago is just not prudent. Rather then waste the time figuring out who is owed what, just fix the problem and move forward.

Anybody want to bet all the records they need to help pay people back are lost.Or a water pipe will break,rendering all the files useless.

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/20 ... y_might_refund_drive.html

Jersey City officials are considering kicking back possibly thousands of dollars to drivers whose cars were illegally booted.

In most of the city, cars can only be booted if the owner has three outstanding tickets and hasn't responded to notices to appear in court. But the Parking Authority has been violating this rule for several years, according to some City Council members.

So at its meeting June 17, the City Council voted 5-4 to direct the head of the Jersey City Parking Authority to submit by Sept. 1 a plan to reimburse everyone who has been booted illegally since January 2005.

And the new Jersey City Parking Authority director and former councilwoman, Mary Spinello, also has to write a "corrective plan" to prevent such booting in the future, according to the resolution sponsored by Downtown Councilman Steve Fulop.

"It's a backdoor tax on residents," Fulop said about the city's booting operation.

Persons booted have to spend $152 to get the vehicle immobilization device removed from around their wheel. In most cases, these persons should have just received a $42 ticket.

How much could such a refund cost the city? Perhaps a million dollars, maybe more -- assuming the records can be found, city officials said.

Spinello said she couldn't say how many drivers were illegally booted since January 2005 -- or even how many total were booted -- because the records are not available.

But between Jan. 1 and June 10 of this year, she said roughly 1,800 cars were booted in areas of the city where first-offense booting is not permitted; meaning the cars should have been booted only if the driver had three prior tickets and failed to respond to court notices.

If half of these drivers were booted illegally, that would translate to the city shelling out a roughly $100,000 refund. If the same rate applies stretching back to January 2005, the city could be on the hook for nearly $1 million.

This is the main reason four City Council members -- Mariano Vega, Bill Gaughan, Peter Brennan and Michael Sottolano -- voted against the resolution.

Vega said he wants to find out how much the city would have to refund before moving ahead.

Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy is worried about the precedent of the city owning up to bad behavior.

"We should be cautious with reimbursements for past errors because of the potential financial ramifications for the city and ultimately the taxpayers," Healy said
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As Fulop sees it, he is for doing the right thing."It was never the city's money to begin with," he said.

Jennifer Morrill, spokeswoman for the city, attributed undeserved booting by the parking authority to "human" or "technological" errors, noting if the agency is alerted to the error it will remove the boot for free and refund "incorrectly levied fees" and has done so 74 times since January.

Spinello, who became the head of the agency in April, said it has cut its booting by 41 percent.

Harsimus Cove resident Neal Kimball thinks he deserves a refund. He received the boot the day after he purchased his new Honda CRV. He acknowledges he got back to his car after the non-resident two-hour parking limit expired.

"Yes I should have gotten that ticket. But I didn't think I should have got the boot," he said.