Re “Which Truth Should We Swallow?”
[Editor’s Note: Following yesterday’s posting of a letter from Robert Zirgulis concerning the division of parking ticket revenues between City Hall and a vendor, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Muir filed the following response with Mr. Zirgulis and the newspaper.]
Mr. Zirgulis:
This is in furtherance of our discussion last night at the Democratic Club meeting. You provided a copy of a document from 2009 that stated the Police Dept. received approximate 50 percent of ticket revenue from Turbo Data. From this statement, you extrapolated that the city was paying Turbo Data in excess of $1 million per year to process our parking violations. As I stated at the meeting, I can assure you this is not the case.
The Revenue Report document you had was part of an agenda item that included the “Preliminary Year-End Report for FY 2008-09” and the “City of Culver City Revenue Report.” You are absolutely correct that page 34 of that report included the following description: “Court Fines – General – #1) Parking tickets (violator pays to Turbo Data, Police Department receives approximately 50% of ticket from Turbo Data). #2) Parking bail for unpaid parking tickets (receive monthly check in arrears from State of CA – they determine the revenue amount).”
Unfortunately, the text that ended up in the report is clearly erroneous. This report was a combination of information compiled by the Finance Dept. as well as operating departments. A lot of the specific departmental revenue information was taken directly from those departments and included in the report. I feel this 50 percent figure must have been a typographical error. However, in the end the Finance Dept. was responsible for reviewing this information, and in this case, we clearly missed this. This is not the way the payments to Turbo Data Systems work.
The agreement with Turbo Data Systems includes specific amounts per ticket for base processing. The basic fees are as follows:
Automated Citation Processing – $1.155 per ticket
Handwritten Citation Processing – $1.255 per ticket
There are a few other fees that come into play for tickets that remain unpaid where further action is required, although the majority of tickets are paid off of the basic notice.
Below are the total amounts paid by the city to Turbo Data for the last three years:
FY 09/10 $63,463
FY 10/11 $84,192
FY 11/12 $78,301
During the last 13 years of data in our financial system, Turbo Data has been paid a total of $1,048,430. This is an average of $80,648 per year.
Over this same period, city revenues from parking tickets has been:
FY 09/10 $1,855,346
FY 10/11 $1,829,663
FY 11/12 $1,608,792 (doesn’t include June revenue)
I am hopeful this clears the matter up. I apologize for the erroneous information in the 2009 report and the confusion it may have caused you. I would totally agree with your position that 50 percent is way too much to pay for such services. Fortunately, it is actually closer to 4 percent.
Should you have further questions on this, please let me know.
Finally, I noticed today there was a posting on The Front Page Online regarding this. Since this is available for the public to see, I would not want them to get the wrong idea. Therefore I will be providing a copy of this response.
Mr. Muir may be contacted at jeff.muir@culvercity.org
