Columbia parking tickets could now result in court appearance, cost city thousands

Changes made by the Missouri Supreme Court to the state’s municipal court system could cost the city of Columbia thousands of dollars, and require those with unpaid parking tickets to show up in court.

A new rule from the state’s high court took effect on May 1 that required all city ordinance violations to come with a follow-up court date. For Columbia, that includes parking tickets, and court leaders believe it will cause dozens of new cases to come to court.

The Columbia City Council approved new money for the municipal court and the law department to handle the possible influx of new cases. The court division asked for three new employees, while the law department’s prosecution division got four new part-time positions. The departments expect to pay $174,334 and $94,000 respectively each year.

Paying the ticket will dispose of the case, but the new rule allows for people to contest the case in court, Noce said. Before the rule change, the fine for a parking ticket went up from $15 to $30 if unpaid after 30 days of getting it. People could contest their parking ticket with the city prosecutor. Noce said the city prosecutor can call for a vehicle to be towed or stuck with a Barnacle device.

Tickets will now come with a future court date on them, and missing the court date without paying could lead to future court summonses and even warrants. Tickets can still be paid out of court, and people may still choose to contest those tickets with the prosecutor.

Noce said he expects to issue some arrest warrants due to sheer volume of cases that will come to court. More than 28,000 parking tickets went unpaid after 30 days in 2018, Noce said, and those people would be expected to show up in court under the new rules. Noce said he had a plan to limit the number of warrants.

“I’m going to try and send them two summonses, as long as they have a good address,” Noce said. “My hope is that we can to then eliminate as many warrants as we possibly can before we start issuing warrants.”

Noce said the extra staff members will help them process the potential new cases. The city handed out more than 63,000 parking tickets in 2018. Seventy-two percent of municipal court cases dealt with traffic violations. Noce estimated that court traffic would triple if just 20 percent of people that received a parking ticket came to court.

“We’re trying to set it up where there’s a docket that the numbers don;t really exceed the capacity of the courtroom of actual people that are coming in,” Noce said. “We’re going to certainly have to balance that to make sure it works right.”

The Missouri Supreme Court ordered numerous municipal court reforms since 2015, following protests in Ferguson, Missouri that in part called for changes to the criminal justice system. The court ordered the rule change in question in Oct. 2018.

City attorney Nancy Thompson said the city could make parking ticket enforcement an administrative duty, and remove it from the Supreme Court rule requiring it come with a court date. Only a few cities, including Kansas City and St. Louis, are allowed to do so by state law, and the state legislature would have to change that for Columbia to do so, too.

Second Ward councilman Michael Trapp said he supported the city pushing for that change.

“You can still do justice without clogging up the courts with a lot of stuff or generate warrants which is inherently problematic,” Trapp said.