City Budget Relies Heavily on Fines Through Traps

With great élan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Thursday that the city did not need to raise taxes later this year. No one jumped up to argue that point.

Taxes, however, are not the only way to trim the public hide.

A few hours after Mr. Bloomberg spoke, a team of police officers set up in SoHo for one of their twice-daily exercises in shooting fish in a barrel: nabbing drivers going south on Broadway just below Houston Street in Manhattan.

During the morning and evening rush, there is a virtually unlimited supply of law-breaking drivers who encroach on a lane reserved for buses. A relatively new traffic configuration limits cars to a single lane from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., a change that is announced on signs hanging over the lane, and to which the drivers must adjust immediately after they have crossed Houston.

So police officers, crooking a single finger, have ordered scores of drivers to the curb for breaking the law and issued them a fine for $130. Whatever the virtues of bus lanes, and there are many, this one is a trap — a lucrative one. One police officer, giving a summons at that spot recently, conceded that traffic would be backed up to 14th Street if some drivers did not make their way into that Broadway bus lane.

No mayor for decades has been able to resist the lure of raising revenue with fines, the tax that dares not say its name. During one blitz in the 1990s, the city was ticketing electric pony rides outside stores on Myrtle Avenue in Queens. Around the same time, a driver in the Bronx discovered that the police had figured out a way to abruptly trigger a red light near the Bronx Zoo. They needed to bring fresh supplies of ballpoint pens every day to keep up with the workload of drivers caught running the surprise light.

(When news broke of that snare, the man who blew the whistle on it, James Schillaci, was arrested within hours on a 13-year-old traffic warrant, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor at the time, blistered him with invective. Under the next mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, the city had to pay the man $290,000 to settle his harassment suit, offsetting much of the revenue generated by the red-light trap.)

In any event, the march of time and fines is unmistakable: in 2002, the city collected $380 million in parking fines. The mayor’s budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 calls for $518 million, a modest increase from the current $513 million. These revenues are part of a larger bundle of fines for violations of codes covering areas like sanitation, health and taxis. That sum will reach $802 million, up from $786 million this year and $457 million 10 years ago.

Two points should not be forgotten in these discussions. The city’s overall budget, buttressed by higher property values, has climbed by about 50 percent in those 10 years; and quite a few fines cost more to issue and collect than they are worth. The fines are welcomed because there is little sympathy for people who dump garbage on the streets or can’t be bothered to clean rat pellets off their food counters.

When it comes to profitability, if not popularity, parking tickets are an exception; the city clears 80 cents or more on the dollar, a 2003 study by the Independent Budget Office found. The parking ticket collection offices in the five boroughs appear to be a model of efficiency; accused miscreants go through the places at a near sprint. A program offered by the city allowing violators to settle tickets at a discount was dropped at the end of January because many of the people taking advantage of it had dozens of outstanding tickets and were pure scofflaws, a spokesman for the Finance Department said.

The revenue from traffic tickets issued by the police is shared between the state and the city. And of course, it’s not just about the money. If the city is going to have a reasonable mass transit system, bus lanes must be protected from cars. But whether it makes sense at that spot on Broadway just below Houston has made more than a few government officials wonder.

“It goes against the intent of bus lanes because it causes congestion,” said one senior official in state government who regularly works with the Police Department. As it happens, that official was himself caught in the trap. Having managed to wiggle out of the ticket, he declined to be named.

“The cops have to write a certain number of parkers, and a certain number of movers,” the official said. “They can fill the quota in an hour. It’s easy quota-filling, and it’s easy money.”