News

Jun 02, 2023

Unpaid parking tickets in Allentown can land you in jail. Why at least one City Council member wants to change that

April Gamiz/The Morning Call The Allentown Parking Authority office is seen

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

The Allentown Parking Authority office is seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

Parked cars are seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, along Hamilton Street in Allentown. (April Gamiz/The Morning Call)

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

The Allentown Parking Authority office is seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

An Allentown Parking Authority parking ticket is seen on a car Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

Parked cars are seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, along Hamilton Street in Allentown.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

Parked cars are seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, along Hamilton Street in Allentown.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

The Allentown Parking Authority office is seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city. (April Gamiz/The Morning Call)

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

An Allentown Parking Authority parking ticket is seen on a car Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

The Allentown Parking Authority office is seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

An Allentown Parking Authority parking ticket is seen on a car Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, in the city.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

Parked cars are seen Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, along Hamilton Street in Allentown.

In Allentown, letting too many unpaid parking tickets add up could mean up to 10 days in jail.

Some on City Council are trying to change that.

A bill sponsored by council member Ce-Ce Gerlach would eliminate a provision of an Allentown ordinance that allows anyone who has racked up enough unpaid parking tickets to be imprisoned for up to 10 days.

But Gerlach and some other council members are looking beyond just unpaid parking tickets. A search for "imprisonment" on the city's e-code site, which compiles all of the city's laws and ordinances in one place, brings up 89 hits.

That's why Gerlach and fellow council members Natalie Santos and Ed Zucal formed the Penalty Review Committee. The committee plans to review the city code for all situations where imprisonment can be used as a punishment and reconsider them.

Though the city does not have jurisdiction over who gets imprisoned for violating state or federal laws, the city can change its code to remove imprisonment as a punishment for city level offenses from lacking a bike permit to hosting an event without a permit.

If the city eliminates imprisonment as a punishment for unpaid parking tickets, it would be following in the footsteps of Reading, which took similar action in 2016.

The Reading Parking Authority voted to transfer the city's 15,000 pending parking tickets from the criminal court system to the parking authority's civil system.

Under that system, no one will be committed to prison for inability to pay parking fines or court costs; instead, if fines are not paid, parking enforcement officers will boot cars.

To Gerlach and other sponsors of the measure, it's about "decriminalizing poverty." In a city where the poverty rate is 23%, nearly double Pennsylvania as a whole, no one should be in prison for their inability to pay a fine, she said.

"Being poor is not a crime," Gerlach said. "There are far more greater threats to the city of Allentown, far more crimes that are actually crimes that are happening, that I don't want it to ever be a possibility that someone could sit in a jail cell for two hours, one hour, 30 minutes because of unpaid parking tickets."

But some skeptics on council say that arrests and imprisonments for unpaid parking tickets are rare, or practically nonexistent.

"I would highly doubt based on the city codes you would ever see anyone first of all get the maximum fine, let alone imprisoned," Zucal said.

Zucal said he reached out to several magisterial district judges in Allentown, and said only one could recall anyone ending up in prison for unpaid parking tickets, which happened in 2013.

The Morning Call reached out to seven magisterial district judges whose districts comprise most of Allentown. Five did not respond in time for publication deadline, and two said they could not provide any information.

Allentown Parking Authority executive director John Morgan also said that imprisonment as a consequence of unpaid parking tickets is a "non-issue," and he has never seen it happen in his five years in the position.

"We are not looking to incarcerate anyone," Morgan said. "Someone made a comment on the internet, ‘We’re just punishing poor people,’ but we don't know if you are poor or rich when we write a ticket."

But Jessica Ortiz, executive director of Allentown nonprofit the Ortiz Ark Foundation, said it almost happened to her family.

A sheriff came to her family's home to arrest her daughter, Ortiz said, because she had not seen her parking ticket and violation notice, and thus did not show up for a court date. She said because her family had the cash on hand to pay her daughter's fines, she did not go to prison.

She also said she's had over 25 clients at her nonprofit who have received court notices, and knows of at least one who was imprisoned for a week over unpaid parking tickets. It's an issue that disproportionately impacts vulnerable people in Allentown, she said.

"If you are Spanish, from another country, from Puerto Rico, and you get a judge notice, your world falls apart," Ortiz said. "Because a code was violated that you may not have known about in your house. It is a very scary situation."

"When I hear people aren't going to jail? Absolutely the opposite. They come, they arrest you," she added.

Gerlach concurred. The reason it appears as though few people are imprisoned for unpaid parking tickets is because, more often than not, they are imprisoned for missing a court date for the parking tickets, not just the unpaid fees alone, she argued.

She has a right-to-know request pending with the county to determine how many people have been imprisoned because of unpaid tickets in Allentown, she said.

Mayor Matt Tuerk said in a statement that he supports the effort to review imprisonment as a penalty for minor infractions.

"It's inconsistent with the values of our city to threaten imprisonment for not getting a permit to have a party in a park or to ride one's bike with no hands," Tuerk said in a statement.

Gerlach said the Penalty Review Committee, which had its first meeting Jan. 18, would reconvene in February or March to consider an overhaul of the city's imprisonment-related policies.

Morning Call reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at [email protected].

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