Fixing PPA, a dream coming true?

Last night, I had a dream. And in this dream, drivers weren't clobbered with late fees from the Philadelphia Parking Authority for not paying parking tickets they didn't know they'd incurred

I know: If I am dreaming about the PPA, I need a brain scrub at a day spa. But I blame City Councilman Bill Greenlee for PPA's invasion into my slumbers.

See, yesterday, Greenlee told me about a bill he will introduce today that requires the PPA to offer a grace period before it assesses penalties for failure to pay a parking ticket.

Currently, drivers have 15 days to pay a ticket. After that, the ticket is considered tardy and the fines start piling up.

The problem is, many a parking ticket goes rogue. That's the term I used in a recent column about violations that go missing from a driver's windshield. The reasons are innocent (the wind snatched it), annoying (a prankster stole it) and outrageous (a PPA enforcement officer scribbled a bogus ticket and didn't want the driver to know about it until later).

Whatever the cause, by the time a driver learns of the violation, via a mailed notice after the fact, he's already racked up late fees - which can be resolved only in a face-to-face hearing.

How can you prove you never got a ticket? You can't. So you pay the ticket and the late fee.

And you fume.

Greenlee would like to see the PPA issue a bill similar to, say, a credit-card statement. It would let us know, first of all, that a violation exists, giving us chance to dispute it. And it would tell us the amount due, when it's due and when late fees will be assessed.

"It's a fairness thing," said Greenlee, who didn't know how widespread the problem was until he read my column (God bless the power of the press!).

Obviously, the details of such a system need to be sussed out in Council hearings. (To testify, call Greenlee at 215-686-3446, as he hopes to fast-track the bill before the end of the current Council session, in December).

But it's unlikely to get resistance from PPA Executive Director Vince Fenerty, who calls Greenlee's idea "visionary."

"I am ashamed that someone here didn't think of it," said Fenerty, as the grace period would "take a lot of complaints away from the authority and away from [Parking Bureau of Administrative Adjudication]. I hope we can work it out quickly."

Fenerty talked about the bill during a PPA news conference yesterday, where he introduced a new social-media plan, created by local vendor ChatterBlast Media. It will use Facebook and Twitter to school us about all things parking-related.

It was the second time in a week that Fenerty and his new customer-service director, Sue Cornell, announced initiatives aimed at improving public relations at the PPA (an agency so reviled, haters have created Facebook pages called "Philadelphia Parking Authority Crime Syndicate" and "Citizens vs. The PPA").

Cornell was, well, a-Twitter.

"I am so excited about this, I want to jump up and down and clap my hands!" said the reliably efficient Cornell, whose promotion last week to customer-service director had me jumping up and down (I stopped at hand-clapping). "We've been working really hard to create a platform that is actually going to change the public perception of the PPA."

The Facebook page will not be a place where the agency "slaps up a few pictures and calls it a day," she says. Instead, citizens can post questions, get prompt answers (often in real time) and learn, quickly and easily, the ins and outs of parking in this crazy city.

Twitter will update us about parking matters. And soon, goes the PPA promise, we'll have access to on-street technology that interacts with our smart phones.

Welcome to 2011!

On a separate note, Fenerty vowed that, within the next month, all backlogged ticket complaints will have been addressed by the PPA, which will then adhere to a 30-day time frame to respond to all future disputes.

That alone ought to lighten the PPA's years-old black eye.

"We are striving to make the whole system better," Fenerty said. "With everything we are rolling out, we hope the press will give us a fair evaluation on how we are trying to cure our customer-service problems."

Fair enough, PPA. Bring it on.

Email polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

www.philly.com/Ronnie. Read Ronnie's blog at www.philly.com/RonnieBlog.