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Victory in battle against Parking Authority practices
Those in the process of appealing tickets could be in luck, following a ruling from the Philly Court of Common Pleas.
Victory in battle against Parking Authority practices
Fighting a parking ticket in Philly isn't easy — but one local man took the fight all the way to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and won. On July 11, Judge Leon Tucker ruled that the city's Bureau of Administrative Adjudication (BAA), where the ticketed must go to contest violations from the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), must allow citizens the opportunity to cross-examine the officers who wrote their tickets. Tucker also ordered the BAA to require that tickets include the exact location of a car in violation, not just the city block, and ordered that ticket writers sign each ticket they issue.
Since many tickets are currently issued without exact addresses, and are generally not signed, the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication would theoretically not be allowed to sustain some tickets currently under appeal. Meaning, if you're currently in the process of appealing a parking ticket, you could be in luck. However, Jerry Connor, director of the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, says the city is still figuring out what the consequences of the ruling will actually be. "The city's finest legal minds are locking at the opinion … and we will be addressing the conclusion of that review. We don't know what it's going to mean yet," he says.
It all started with the appellant in the case, Jim Pavlock, a Fairmount resident who had a couple of parking tickets and decided to fight them in court after losing his appeals with the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication. He had requested the opportunity to cross-examine the PPA officer who wrote the tickets, but was told that the BAA "never" brings in ticketing officers for hearings. Furthermore, one of the tickets cited him for parking in a crosswalk, though he says he was parked mid-block. Because the PPA Enforcement Officers' Handbook doesn't require specific addresses but only says to "use the block number as the location of the vehicle," it leaves room for error, he argued. And, he insisted, the tickets he received should have been signed by the officer in question.
The failure to sign a ticket violates the Philadelphia Code. The Code also requires a ticket to contain the "location of the violation alleged."
However, the law leaves it to the discretion of the BAA Hearing Examiner to determine whether the ticketing officer should be called to appear for cross examination. Pavlock argued successfully that the opportunity for cross examination is a right granted the state's Administrative Agency Law, and that BAA practices went against against past Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings.
Perhaps the "city's finest legal minds" ought not to spend much time on figuring out a way to overturn the effect of the judge's ruling, and step back and consider that the ordinance that created the BAA's system of adjudicating parking tickets in the city where democracy was founded violates due process and Pennsylvania law. The ordinance that create the "Bureau of Administrative Adjudication" (the Parking Authority's "neutral" adjudicative branch," was mandatated to increase the collection of parking fine revenues in the policy statement of the ordinance. The ordinance was specifically created to avoid the requirements of Pennsylvania administrative agency law that mandate reasonable cross-examination at admin. hearings. The ordinance mandated that properly written tickets are "prima facie" evidence of a parking violation; yet, over the years, the PPA has systematically mandated that enforcement officers not sign tickets (in violation of Phila ordinance) and not identify anything more than a city=long block as the location of the violation. Although hearsay, under Pennsylvania case law, is insufficient to sustain an administration finding of liability, Philly's BAA ordinance allows a parking ticket--pure hearsay--with little information supporting the facts establishing a violation--to be admitted without question at BAA hearings. The result is that PPA reaps millions of dollars of fines from frustrated citizens with NO accountability--until now! Judge Tucker has done a service to "we the people" and has pushed back on the PPA/BAA's monolithic parking ticket adjudication system. I hope "we the people" keep an eye on what PPA/BAA does in the coming weeks in an effort to overturn this judge's meritorious ruling that benefits all citizens of Philadelphia against the tyranny of the Parking Authority.— Jim19130
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