WFAA-TV

DALLAS — Flashing zeroes on a parking meter—is there a more visible sign that your luck (and your quarter) just ran out?

We wondered whether Dallas officers are required to write a certain number of tickets.

Two years ago, the city signed a contract with a private company called ACS—a local company that serves some of the largest cities in the country.

For $2.5 million, ACS doesn't write the actual tickets, but it does just about everything else—including collections.

They're really good at that.

Dallas gets to keep almost $6 million in fines, as long as officers write 198,000 tickets.

But Zena Fernino, the city's parking enforcement manager, says that is "absolutely not" a quota.

In 2002-2003, the city issued nearly 150,000 citations. One year later, the total was about 190,000.

After the contract with ACS was written two years ago, about 192,000 tickets were written.

That number is now up to 198,000.

"It's important that we try to meet our goal, because we know that it is possible, based on historical trends, Fernino said.

She maintains that public service officers are not required to write a certain number of tickets. However, they are partially evaluated on their ability to write 85 to 110 percent of the number of tickets that other officers have written on the same streets.

Officers with low numbers are sometimes retrained.

Compare that policy to Fort Worth's, where there is no target number of tickets for the city or for individual ticket-writers.

"I think that the taxpayers are owed eight hours of work," Fernino said. "I think the taxpayers are owed that much."

But Fernino noted that not only are quotas against the law; they're bad customer service. She said that if officers were required to write a certain number of tickets, some citizens would inevitably be upset.

Last year, Dallas fell short of its ticket goal because it was changing over to new systems and equipment.

It expects to meet its ticket target this year.

E-mail dschechter@wfaa.com