The Syracuse City Council met on April 16, 2026, at 6:20 PM ET to receive an update from the Parking Violations Bureau (PVB) on parking, automated enforcement programs, and illegal set outs. Director Leah Whitmer presented data and answered questions from Councilors Moore, Hudson, and others.
Let's get this part started. Let's go. So in addition to my colleagues that were here. Last session, we were joined by counselors Moore. And Hudson. We are still here with Leah Whitmer. But we're transitioning to the official title. Parking Violations Bureau. Parking Violations Bureau. Thank you very much. No problem. So I don't know if you want to preface it with anything or if you think that was a complicated. I'll just add for the counselors that just joined the packet. I gave you page one just gives an overview of the municipal violations bureau as a whole. And I'll point out what I'm really proud of that we are we have already done this fiscal year over 15,000 disputes. Um with the caveat that some of those are still pending with decisions to be issued. On the back of that is an overview of our org chart, and really our only vacancy is one of our two deputy director positions. What this what these what is eight? That's a break the health and sanitation violations. I just tried to show the breakdown of what that 15,000 encompasses. That's automated enforcement. Automated enforcement, okay. Yeah, if you look right up above that, the hearings, I put out the acronym. No, no, that's okay. Because I knew that question would come. Yeah. Um, page two was the BAA and a legal set out information that we covered last hearing, and that brings us to page three parking. Um parking, the like I shared with um illegal set outs. We rolled out the self-service portal. Um, so people have the ability to scan and get everything on their ticket, view the evidence dispute, pick their hearing date and time, the volume of tickets has stayed on par um for the last couple of years, right under 65,000. Um, and the dispute rate is hovering right around 10, 11%. Um, so you can see I gave you a breakdown of you know, the tickets, what was paid, um, issued means that they're still in that 90-day period that somebody has to pay or contest before it goes into collections. And then if you take a look at that disputed right there in the yellow, um, I gave you a breakdown of the tickets. The majority are sustained. Like I said, we do have a big hunk pending right now due to the influx with automated enforcement, and um there's a percentage every year that's dismissed. Actually, a question. Sure, about what we're seeing with the disputes, like with the uh stop sign with the school bus, right? I've recently started like paying more attention of how our bus drivers are driving. Sure. And signaling people to make you, you know, saying, like, okay, what's really happened? Are we finding a lot of people coming in or disputing the so yes? If you flip to the last page, I just gave you a really basic overview of the dispute, the number the volume of tickets issued for each of the three programs. And if we're looking at buses, I did the full program. So it started in May after a 30-day warning period up through March with very little reported in March so far. So just for school buses, just under 7,000 tickets. Um, and it's almost a 50% dispute rate for school buses. Um we see in like what is one of the it's really and it's not that I mean, we sustain most school bus violations. That being said, um, they are the only ticket where you've got two driver behavior being evaluated, right? You've got like you said, you've got the bus driver as well as the vehicle driver, and because it's automated in real time, usually the time when the two vehicles approach is like it's seconds, right? My video length is almost always 11 seconds.