New Parking Ticket System Soon In Place In Yakima

Yakima lost roughly $24,000 last year in unpaid parking tickets so the city is trying to find new ways to hold people accountable for those fines. Tuesday night, city leaders approved the purchase of new technology to track who's paying and who's not. Yakima plans to do that with a device called vCiteplus. It's a high tech pen that will write parking tickets, immediately storing all the information onto city computers. Our news partner KIMA Action News reports the process would sync up violations and payments. The new system also comes with a camera to snap up evidence of each violation. The program isn't cheap. There's a start up fee of $4,600 and then an additional $9,000 a year to keep it going. That cash will come from existing funds. The council opted not the increase the cost of tickets from $20 to $25 in order to pay for the new technology.