Irvington to Outsource Parking Tickets To...

Tarrytown.  No, parking tickets will not be outsourced to India or even Indiana, but for the first time Irvington police and village administrative staff will not be responsibe for the cumbersome process of entering lisence plate info, logging addresses and following-up on overdue fees.

Beginning next month, residents who incur parking tickets in Irvington will notice that Tarrytown-based company Complus Data Innovations now oversees parking ticket responsibilities. 

"With a rising case load for court clerk Andrea Borofsky, we realized it was too much work for her to do everything relating to tickets manually," Lawrence Schopfer, Irvington's village administrator, said. He also noted that Irvington's parking enforcement officers issue a large number of tickets due to the number of free one-hour spaces in the downtown.

However, it may seem surprising that given the difficulty officials had in devising an acceptable budget this year that police and village administrators would suddenly be outsourcing responsibilities.

"The way this system works is that we pay the company 17 percent of all profits the village makes from parking tickets," Schopfer said.  "But we're expecting at least to break even because before only about 78 percent of tickets were ever collected--this company has a collection rate of 95 percent."  

Complus will issue Irvongton police and parking enforcement officers two hand-held devices--free of charge--that register all the information about an individual simply by scanning the lisence plate. Then at the end of the work day, officers will upload all the information into a computer database that goes directly to the company.

"One convenience factor for residents is that they can pay parking tickets online," Schopfer said. "Of course they'll still be able to walk payments to the station as well."

Although Complus has already taken the reins in processing parking violations, poice are still issuing tickets by hand.  The complete changeover, Schopfer said, will take place in about four weeks.  

Schopfer said the decision to change over to Complus was not a contentious one--and that the village actually hopes to make a profit, despite the 17 percent fee, because of the increased revenues.

And the only downside for residents: they're 17 percent more likely actually to have to pay their parking tickets.