Parking ticket? Some pay with cat food or pencils

MUNCIE, Ind. — There were too many kittens in the animal shelter, just as there had been last year and the year before that. Like other shelters that swell to capacity, Muncie Animal Shelter was struggling this summer to meet the need.

“One day I was standing by the counter and somebody brought in six kittens,” said Officer Chase Winkle, a spokesman for the Muncie Police Department in Indiana. “And before they could get those checked in, somebody came in with another four.”

To ease the pressure, police created a trade-off: For five days in July, people could pay for their parking tickets by donating to the shelter the equivalent value of cat food or litter. Residents who brought their donations to the police chief’s office with a receipt proving the value got their tickets wiped away.

Muncie is among cities across the country that are opting temporarily to accept charitable donations in lieu of monetary payments for parking infractions. From Anchorage, Alaska, to Woodstock, Virginia, municipalities are writing off tickets in exchange for school supplies or cat litter — a way to fill a community need while lessening the sting of getting a ticket. Some cities offer a discount to people who pay with a donation.

In Muncie, about a dozen people made donations to pay for roughly $600 in parking tickets, Winkle said. Only offenses that didn’t pose a safety hazard counted: Donations couldn’t resolve a moving violation or a ticket for parking in a handicap spot.

The initiative, Winkle said, even inspired residents without parking infractions to donate. If someone couldn’t get to the police department or the shelter, the department sent a uniformed car to pick up their contribution. People across the country sent supplies, Winkle said, and other cities called Muncie police to ask how they had run their program.

The city’s animal shelter has recently been housing about 350 cats and kittens, which means using 50 bags of litter in a week, said Ashley Honeycutt, the shelter’s office manager. Donations from the parking ticket program alleviated some of the burden, Honeycutt said.

In Las Vegas, pencils and Post-it Notes are now parking-ticket currency. Drivers there can donate new, unwrapped school supplies that will go to a nonprofit group associated with the city’s education foundation. Drivers have to bring their receipts and make the donations within 30 days of receiving their citations dated June 19 through July 19.

Las Vegas so far has collected $1,707 in school supplies, city spokesman Jace Radke said. One man who had $100 in tickets brought $100 in erasers, Radke said.

“Nobody likes to get a parking ticket,” Radke said. “But if you can pay it forward and give a donation of school supplies that will help somebody, it kind of makes it less bad.”

Two hundred pencils or 100 pens will make up for a $20 parking ticket in Anchorage. The cost of those supplies totals about $10 and Anchorage subsidizes the remaining $10 of each ticket, said Demetric Tuggle, the parking director at the cityoperated Easypark Alaska.

As Alaska’s government faces significant budget cuts, including to education, Tuggle said Easypark wanted to make up for lost resources. About 25 people so far have donated supplies to fill four bins, she said.

Greensboro, North Carolina, typically writes about $85,000 worth of citations in August and expects to lose an unknown portion of that revenue when some people use school supplies to resolve their tickets this month, said Stephen Carter, the business and parking manager for the city’s transportation department.

That loss of funds is worth it, Carter said, to pay some of the classroom costs that typically come out of teachers’ pockets.