parking ticket turned into Allianceone (collections) need help!

[jk85]

I need help! I got two parking tickets (one for no visible front license plate and the other one for parking within 5 ft of driveway)in december of last year. I responded immediately by sending the ticket back to court with a checkmark for a contested hearing. But then I never got a mail back from the court, or a notification of any kind. I guess i kinda figured the tickets had been waived. But a couple weeks ago, in May 2012, I get a bill from Allianone, a collection agency for Seattle municipal court. I sent in a dispute letter both to the court and to Allianceone. The court sent a letter back to me saying that they sent a notice with a hearing date but i hadn’t shown up. But the address they said they sent it to is my old address. It is not even my previous address, it is the adderess of the apartment 4 years ago. And I know I have made changes of addresses to the my Washington driver’s license many times since then, since I moved every year.

What can I do at this point to dispute this case? I called the Seattle court myself but the only thing they would say is that it is my responsibiltiy to contact the court in case the letter ended up in a wrong address.

Any suggestions or ideas?

Does anyone have similar experiences?

I just want to hear any comments. Help!!

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[clark5080]

Pay it

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[changingtimes]

If u go down to the court house alliance 1 has 2 windows u can talk directly to someone or just call them. I just went through this procedure and it seems that the court wants nothing to do with you once alliance takes over.

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[DBP]

You will have to prove to Allianceone and/or the Municipal Court that you have kept current on your address info with the Department of Licensing. Ask DOL to provide you with a written record of ALL the updates they’ve made to your record in the last four years. If they don’t show any updates from you, then you’ll have to fall back on some other kind of documentation (if you’ve got any) showing that you notified the Department of Licensing that you moved.

If you can’t provide documentation showing that DOL or the Municipal Court screwed up, then your best bet is to try and negotiate something with the collection agency.

Good luck.

***************************************************************************************

In the future, whenever you contest a ticket like this, call or visit the court within a couple of weeks of mailing the paper in, just to make sure they’ve got your request on file and are using your current address. Keep records of all correspondence.

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[quesera]

I had a collections agency bugging me after I sold my car and the new owner didn’t register it. He was getting tickets all over town. I had to show each of his creditors the proof of sale. Once the collections agency realized that they didn’t have the right to come after me, they backed off very quickly. If I were you, I would at least try showing the collections agency that the court was in the wrong. Show them documentation that you changed your address through all of the correct channels. While the court won’t want to budge, the collections agency may decide that they don’t want to engage in a case that isn’t clear cut and could end up with them being in trouble. They may bounce it back to the court, who will then likely be more apt to work with you. If the collections agency doesn’t like the liability they have to assume, it may not be worth the fee they’re getting.

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[waterworld]

Parking tickets are issued to the vehicle, because the owner isn’t present. The officer would have used the license plate number to get the vehicle registration information, and that information would be in the court system linked to the parking ticket. The owner of the vehicle is responsible for the ticket, but the ticket is issued to the vehicle. So if you have not updated your mailing address on your vehicle registration, then the court has whatever previous address was associated with the vehicle registration. Updating your driver’s license has no effect on your vehicle registration — you need to update both every time you move.

If that’s what happened — your vehicle registration was still tied to an older address — then you are probably stuck. You might be able to negotiate a lower amount with AllianceOne, but it’s unlikely.

If, however, the court had the correct address for you, then there’s a procedure for filing a request to the judge to set aside the determination and order a new hearing. You may be able to look up some information on what happened with the parking tickets by going to the City’s online public information system and looking them up. The site is here: http://web1.seattle.gov/courts/cpi/

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[Genesee Hill]

I agree with clark5080.

Pay it.

I am sure you had a properly displayed front license plate?

I bet you were parked over five feet from the driveway?

Just like you updated the address on the registration of your vehicle?

Hehe.

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[SKB]

AllianceOne doesn’t mess around… pay it now & get them off your back or your may find yourself with a boot on your car one morning! They’re quick to collect, but drag their feet when you dispute anything (thus I got “the boot”). But you can eventually prevail if you stick to it, be prepared to get passed around to various supervisors though!

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[jk85]

Wow I wasn’t expecting to get this many supports in a day. Thank you for all your inputs!

changingtimes

– Hi, do you mean the municipal court in downtown Seattle has 2 windows for Alliance one?

DBP

– Yes, great idea about getting the written record of all the updates i made in the last four years! But when i called the court compliance department, they said it is still my responsiblity to call the court to see if a hearing date was set up even though the mail was sent to a wrong address. Can I still fight it on the grounds that the mail got sent to my old address? And yes, I’ll definitely take your advice on calling or visiting the court within a couple of weeks of mailing the paper in in the future.

quesera

– Thanks for your suggestion, I’ll definitely show AllianceOne the proof of the updates of address changes i made in the past.

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[jk85]

Hi waterworld.

The address they sent the mail to was my old apartment address 4 years ago, and I bought the car in Summer of 2011 (last year) and registered then. So i don’t think the information on my car should show that old address 4years ago.

And can you tell me more about that procedure for filing a request to the judge to set aside the determination and order a new hearing? I couldn’t really find how to do it on the webpage you possted :-( Sorry to be bugging!

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[jk85]

Hi Genesee Hill.

Thanks for your suggestion.

But I didn’t say I had a properly displayed front license plate or I was parked over five feet from the driveway.

In fact, I did not have the front license plate and I think I was parked within five feet of the driveway.

But I wanted to contest it anyway and whether or not those two thing really happened is irrelevant with this Allianceone case :-)

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[KBear]

If you didn’t have a front license plate and you were parked within 5 feet of a driveway, on what basis did you intend to contest the citation? Because you didn’t feel like paying?

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[waterworld]

jk85: Well, it’s kinda complicated, but I think with a little help from the clerks at the counter at Municipal Court, you might be able to get a form for this, or at least some guidance on how to file the request. I can mostly just point you to the applicable rules and tell you what I know about how they work.

Infraction hearings are governed by a set of rules called the Infraction Rules for Courts of Limited Jurisdiction, or IRLJ. (Go to the main website for Washington Court Rules at http://www.courts.wa.gov/court_rules/ and follow the link to “Rules for Courts of Limited Jurisdiction,” and you’ll get to a page that has links to the IRLJ and another key set of rules called the CRLJ.)

From what you posted, I suspect that the court received your request for a hearing and mailed out a hearing notice, which you never received, because they sent it to the wrong address. If so, the hearing occurred, but you did not appear. IRLJ 3.2(a) says what happens when the defendant fails to appear — namely, the court enters judgment against you. IRLJ 3.2(b) gives you a possible remedy:

3.2(b) Setting Aside Judgment Upon Failure To Appear. For good cause shown and upon terms the court deems just, the court may set aside a judgment entered upon a failure to appear in accordance with CRLJ 60(b).

There’s a link to the Rules for Courts of Limited Jurisdiction, or CRLJ on that page I mentioned above. Rule 60(b) has a bunch of subsections. Subsections (a), (b), and (c) list all the different reasons the court could decide to vacate or set aside the judgment. Subsection (b) in particular talks about “mistakes,” and subsection (b)(11) says that the court can set aside a judgment “for any reason justifying relief.” That’s a sort of catch-all provision that gives the court the power to set aside judgments for all kinds of “mistakes” that might have occurred. What I would say in your situation is that sending the hearing notice to the wrong address, if it was the City’s fault, is a “mistake” that warrants setting aside the judgment.

As for how you actually do this, look at subsection (e) of Rule 60. It spells out how you make the request to set aside the judgment against you. (This is where I think you could ask the clerks whether they have a generic “motion” form you could use, so you don’t have to create the whole thing from scratch.) Basically, you write down, concisely and clearly, what you want the court to do and why the court should do it. Your request would be for the court to vacate or set aside the judgment and give you a new hearing date on the parking tickets. The reason why the court should do this is that you did not get notice of the hearing through no fault of your own. If you can, you should attach copies of your driver’s license, vehicle registration, and whatever you have that shows where the court sent the notice. If you don’t have all those documents, you can explain that in your request, but it’s much better if you use copies to prove it.

Since you don’t know why the court used the old address, I wouldn’t speculate about it in the request you write to the court. Just demonstrate that all of your “official” records were up-to-date, so there’s no good reason why the court would have used a four-year old address.

The clerks should be able to tell you how and where to file the request and get it served on the City Attorney’s office. The important thing is to make sure it’s filed in the correct place and that you have delivered a copy to the City. Usually, at the filing desk, there’s a counter with ink stamps available so that you can stamp your own copies of documents with proof of filing. I would mail a copy, with a filed stamp on it, to AllianceOne, also. And keep copies of everything for yourself.

Also, make sure the clerk’s office at Municipal Court has your correct address now. Have someone check there and verify it for you. After you file your motion, you should hear from the court. (If you don’t hear within two or three weeks, call them!) I would expect you will get a hearing date — this being a hearing on your motion, not the new hearing on your parking tickets. If you get a hearing date, go to court ready to explain this all to the court orally.

NONE OF THIS IS LEGAL ADVICE, AND YOU CANNOT RELY ON IT AS SUCH. If you need legal advice, talk to a lawyer. Or better yet, hire a lawyer to do all this for you.

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[j-roam]

You said that you requested a hearing by mailing the ticket. The request form on the back of the ticket includes blanks for your name and address. This is the address the Court should have used … IF you completed the form. You said the Court used an old address. So, either you wrote the old address on the form (unlikely), or you left the form blank and the Court used the best address it had–return address, DOL address, address in its system from a previous hearing–or you supplied the correct address and the Court erred in using an old address. If you are confident you completed the form correctly, you should contact the Court, they will probably have the form in their files and once they confirm that they used an old address instead of the one you provided, they will probably reschedule the hearing… On the other hand, if you left the address blank on the hearing request form, then I think you have only yourself to blame, and you should pay up.

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[Spring Chicken]

LOL! pay it

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[DBP]

How much is the outstanding amount, by the way? If it’s a couple of hundred, it might not be worth fighting.

A couple thousand? Possibly worth fighting. Depends on how much your time is worth to you.

If you win on the collections thing, you might wanna drop the original appeal. What was the ticket gonna cost you anyway? Thirty bucks or something?

Meh . . .

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[evergreen]

Waterworld seems to know what she/he is talking about. I would do that first!

The same thing happened to me a few years ago. An unpaid parking ticket, even one in front of your own house, can lead to license suspension and a blemish on your credit report for 7 years. And Alliance One is not a sympathetic company. I would call them immediately prior to paying it off or hiring a lawyer & ask what you need to do to get it removed from your credit report — if what Waterworld advised doesn’t work, your only leverage w/ Alliance One would be that it is unpaid, so perhaps you can pay in exchange for a written agreement from them that they will take it off your credit report. Call them to find out what their policy is in removing it. I eventually got two Alliance One tickets removed from my credit report, but only two years later after lots of phone calls and pleading.

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[changingtimes]

Yes. The municipal court has 2 alliance one windows at the court house, which makes it easy I guess to pay the ticket, you go to there window and pay the collection agency then bring the receipt to the court window next to it who document the receipt and give you the paid in full court paperwork…then u walk across the street and to the vehicle licenceing place and give them the paperwork and they give you the tabs. It was a two hour ordeal when I did it. To everyone else who doesn’t have tickets. Did u know the southwest community center

now can issue tabs and pet licenses. I called them first after finding online. They can’t do anything if you are sent to collections but the lady on the phone was super sweet she was able to look up all my information and tell me exactly what to do. :)

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[spana]

Re: evergreen, I’m pretty sure parking tickets actually cannot lead to license suspension (hence ‘the boot’ is needed).

Can anyone confirm/deny?

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[Bostonman]

You are just asking for a long dragged out process trying to fight Alliance one. My ex wife wound up with a parking ticket for a car she got in the divorce but never changed the registration to be in just her name. I was forced to pay it before it hit my credit.

If it hits your credit then no amount of fighting will repair that damage. You should just pay it especially if you were in violation as you stated. In fact if you were in the wrong suck it up and accept personal responsibility for it.

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[Betty T]

As long as that ticket sits in collections, for whatever reason, it grows due to interest. Hiring an attorney would most likely be way more than the ticket! If you knew you were wrong, you should have just paid the ticket and chalk it up to experience.You have had a lot of good advice but it seems alot of effort over a small charge.When you move you’re supposed to change the address on your driver license. It sounds like

lack of info somewhere by someone.

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[Author]

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