NEW ROCHELLE, NY — The New Rochelle City Council has approved adopting the “White Plains model” for parking violation collections.
At Tuesday’s meeting of the City Council, New Rochelle adopted a plan to transfer parking violation collections to a new bureau within the City government under the control of the City Manager.
Finance Commissioner Howard Ratner presented four alternatives, based on a recommendation from the Citizens’ Panel on Sustainable Budgets, while explaining the unusual nature of the current system:
Presently, the collection of parking violations has been the responsibility of the City Court. a State entity. The City bas funded. as many as six full-time and one part-time clerical employees to support the Court Unlike any other operation in Westchester County that we are aware of, these employees are not supervised by a City employee, but by the Court Clerk, a New York State employee (Court Clerk James Generoso).
For many years, two or three of the City personnel were shifted to other Court functions, such as traffic and civil operations, which otherwise would have been an obligation of the State. While all cities in Westchester County have municipal courts, our research has determined that no other municipality provides staffing or funding for criminal, civil or traffic functions performed by municipal courts. (emphasis added)
The stated benefit of transferring the responsibility and management of parking violation collections from the City Court to the City Manager, would be cost savings and to assure a clear level of accountability.
Politically, the effect is to take away power from Mr. Generoso who is the most senior and highly paid Republican on the public payroll in New Rochelle.
Ratner told City Council that integrating parking violation collection clerical staff with similar revenue collection functions in another department, additional cost savings can be realized and efficiencies can be achieved through staff cross training.
Ratner reported:
Several years ago, the City implemented on-line payment of parking tickets through the City’s website which has reduced the foot traffic visiting the Court and consequently the workload of the parking violations operation. Currently, approximately one-quarter of all parking tickets issued are paid through the website. Other efficiency enhancements have been implemented in other communities (e.g., on-line appeals) to further reduce operational costs.
Over the past four years, through attrition and interdepartmental transfers, the City has reduced its funding of City Court operations to the FY 2013 budgeted level of four full-time and one part-time clerical positions. Two of these positions are presently assigned to functions other than parking violations. At the same time, the number of parking violations issued annually by the Police Department has declined from 90,000 to around 68,000 in FY 2012, largely due to staffing reductions.