Unraveling The Mystery Of Chalkless Parking Tickets

I HAVEN'T had an overtime-parking ticket slapped on my windshield in eons. At 20 bucks a pop, you can't be too careful.

But some of my colleagues who slip from one 2-hour spot to the next are convinced the Seattle Police Department has some kind of new stealth device to nail them.

Metered parking is easy enforcement. When the time runs out, so does your luck. Enforcement in the city's time zones that range from 1 hour to 4 hours is trickier.

The standard procedure for parking enforcement officers is to put a chalk mark on tires to determine if cars have been camped too long.

That's why you see so many people shining their tires with rags just after the parking-enforcement buggy has passed. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. No chalk. No crime. Supposedly.

Two of our observant copy editors were dismayed a few days ago when they got "chalkless" overtime-parking tickets in the 2-hour zone along Fairview Avenue North next to The Times. There had been nary a mark on their tires. Nothing to erase. No reason to move to another spot.

Hmmm. Must be some new kind of secret weapon.

Maybe, one surmised, the parking-enforcement officer was squirting on some sort of invisible ink that could be read with specially treated glasses. Dick Tracy stuff.

An overly imaginative wag wondered if the police were splashing DNA juice on his tires. He's been watching too much Simpson-trial coverage.

Then along came what used to be called a meter maid until a few men invaded the ranks and gender specificity became irrelevant as well as politically incorrect.

She slowed, stopped briefly, then moved on without using one of those long sticks to chalk the tires.

Very suspicious.

Sleuthing police parking-enforcement techniques is not easy. For understandable reasons, enforcement officials are tight-lipped about department tricks.

But, no, they don't have any invisible-ink or laser-type markings. They do have "other options" to chalking.

I was told the chalkless tickets on Fairview probably were from "valve-stem readings."

This is how it works: Enforcement officers mark license plates and the position of a tire's valve stem as on a clock. If the stem still is at, say, 3 o'clock two hours after first being checked, that's grounds for a ticket.

You learn something new every day.

So why can't a parking scofflaw just inch forward or backward to set his or her valve stem at, say 5 o'clock? The city's 59 parking-enforcement officers aren't stuck on the readings alone. They get to know their territory, their territorial squatters - and their moves to avoid a ticket.

Technically, it's a violation to stay in the same block more than the allotted time limit. The reasons for time limits are simple: so parking isn't hogged by a few.

If the minimum $20 fine isn't paid in 15 days, another $25 is added on. After 45 days, it is turned over to a collection agency whose fees resemble the national debt.

Our most famous parking-fine delinquent was Bob Royer, former deputy mayor and brother of Mayor Charles Royer. In 1978, he piled up $443 in unpaid parking tickets.

Royer, now a government-affairs consultant, was a piker compared to a man who piled up $4,500 in back parking tickets.

Seattle, as you might guess, is the overtime-parking capital of the state. It usually accounts for more than half of the state's (meter and other) parking tickets.

In 1991, the city collected $8.3 million in parking fines. Then when the overtime-parking fine jumped from $16 to $20 in 1992, collections shot up to $11.1 million. Last year, the total was $11.9 million.

The public screamed bloody murder when the City Council had the audacity to double overtime fines in 1953 - from $1 to $2. That's barely enough to whet the voracious appetite of today's downtown meters.

Collecting overtime-parking fines remains one of Seattle's growth industries.

All of this leads to some very basic advice: If you are chalkless in Seattle, you might want to check your valve stem.

Don Hannula's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times.