Lodi police recommend new vendor for processing citations
Lodi Police Sgt. Eric VerSteeg recommended Turbo Data as the city’s new citation processing vendor during a Lodi shirtsleeve session held Tuesday morning.
Duncan Solutions has been providing the citation processing service and the city has been using this company since 1993. However, the city received a notice this past winter that the vendor would no longer be providing the service as of June 30, 2017 due to changes in ownership and service.
During his research, VerSteeg said he learned that multiple small to midsize departments were released from their contracts as well.
VerSteeg informed the council that Turbo Data had glowing references and the most intuitive citation software. VerSteeg said Turbo Data also provides a quality automatic citation writing mobile app and utilizes license plate readers and geotagging.
The system can also interface with the current and future police department records systems.
Pricing for Turbo Data is competitive, and the company also has a bilingual staff along with several other benefits. VerSteeg said the total cost of Turbo Data would be $6,670 in year one — the purchase of new equipment accounts for nearly $4,000 of the price — and $2,280 in year two and the years after.
Currently, when parking citations are issued the ticket is handwritten and is sent off for processing where it is entered and a notice is sent to the owner letting them know how to take care of that citation.
During the selection process for a new vendor VerSteeg said the department looked at a vendor’s ability to maintain a cloud database of parking tickets, provide bilingual service through customer support, create statistical reports, provide electronic citation writers, send courtesy notices to violators and collect revenue and conduct advanced revenue recovery through DMV holds and additional notices.
Among other potential vendors, VerSteeg said one company had outdated technology, a couple were much more expensive than the others and another had lackluster reviews.