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Live Stop, Dead Cars
City lots are filling up with seized vehicles.
by Daryl Gale
If you're one of the nearly 31,000 Philadelphians whose car was confiscated under the city's Live Stop program, you're probably already familiar with the contents of this story and have started cursing under your breath while reading it on public transportation. For many others, some questions remain: Whose car gets taken? How do you get it back? And what ever happened to the promise that auto-insurance premiums would drop, since not even a penny has been deducted so far?
Here are the hard numbers. Between last July, when the administration started enforcing Live Stop, and the end of May, 30, 909 cars had been confiscated from drivers without a valid license and/or an up-to-date registration. The program is administered by the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which hauls away the cars and stores them in five lots across the city.
There they wait for owners to reclaim them after paying the necessary fees and acquiring the proper paperwork. That means you have to pay up any tickets and fines, the state's $36 vehicle registration fee, and of course, get some insurance. If no one stakes their claim, the car is auctioned off to the highest bidder. Parking Authority spokesperson Richard Dickson says confiscated cars go to the highest bidder in about a month, which officials consider enough time for owners to get their paperwork in order.
Red lights mean green for GOP
MORE THAN 90,000 motorists have been nailed for running red lights in the first three years of Philadelphia's camera-enforcement program. At $100 a shot, they've paid $9.1 million in fines.Backers of the red-light program say the main beneficiary has been public safety.
"Incidents of death, injury and property damage are dramatically down at the intersections where cameras are installed," the Parking Authority's board chairman, Joseph T. Ashdale, said in a news release last month.
Other beneficiaries include Republican Party officials and their kin.
Like the explosive growth in the Parking Authority's staff and salaries, reported last year by the Daily News, the red-light-camera program has created more jobs for Republican ward leaders, committeemen and their families.
It has also led to thousands of dollars in campaign contributions for GOP organizations and candidates.
More than anyone else, the contributions have flowed to state Rep. John Perzel, the Northeast Philadelphia Republican who engineered a GOP takeover of the Parking Authority in mid-2001.
Submitted by BradyDale on Mon, 08/27/2007 - 1:12pm.
Public Authorities continue to be one of the best means for taking control out of the hands of voters and putting it in the hands of bureaucrats two or three or four steps removed from anyone elected. I've written about the Taxi Drivers in this space several times now, but now Philly Independent Media Center has a great new video coming out a week or so in advance of a two day taxi strike.
Check the video out here.
I'm really glad IMC is paying attention to this issue. It's a fascinating case. It's one that I'd think the Nutter Butters would be going NUTS over. Closed door decisionmaking. Gouging a group of workers and the public. Capricious rulemaking. Lack of access to decisionmakers and no voter oversite. Everything that should be making them crazy mad. I hope they do pick up on it and take action. It really sucks that nobody is in control of the Parking Authority any more and that it has control of Taxis (isn't that ironic? Taxis hardly ever park, you know?).
As an Organizer, I find it exciting because this is a very diverse group of people who are hardscrabble and refuse to be victimized. If they have even close to the participation in their strike that they anticipate in the video, it's a real coup. A beautiful show of worker solidarity. It's so great to see these guys excited to take action, and any time I've sat down with them they really have been.
Now if the taxi cab drivers could just drive a little nicer...