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The city of Phoenix, Arizona is fed up with scofflaws who ignore parking tickets and refuse to pay up. The city reportedly is owed around two million dollars in unpaid fines, and it recently compiled a “boot-and-tow” list for police officers to assist authorities in immobilizing and impounding cars that have been involved in unpaid fines. The only problem? The great majority of those fines are attached to rental cars. The rental agencies to whom the cars belong are refusing to pay, claiming that the tickets are not their problem. The city now faces a tough moral dilemma – impound the cars anyway, or continue to pursue the real offenders of these tickets?

Some of the nation’s biggest names in car rentals are on the list of offenders, which is said to number over thirty-five hundred. There are outstanding tickets over ten years old on the list, each one representing revenue that the cash-strapped city would welcome with open arms. Many of the tickets have since become tied up in the endless loop of collection agencies. Currently, Phoenix is toying with several ideas as to how they can track down the owners of those cars with outstanding obligations. Cameras mounted on traffic lights are one such idea. These cameras could potentially scan the license plates of thousands of cars every day, although there are privacy concerns. Current city statutes call for any car that has three or more unpaid tickets attached it its license plate to be impounded.

There are major concerns with impounding rental cars, of course. The unfortunate city visitor who blithely parks their rental car outside a hotel, restaurant, convention center, or entertainment complex could very well emerge to find their car booted or completely vanished. Police obviously have no way of knowing who exactly has been driving the cars for which they write parking tickets – it could be the registered owner of the vehicle, a friend or family member that has borrowed it, or a customer in the case of cars owned by rental companies. The latter possibility represents a major pain for the city and a public relations nightmare for rental car companies.

The city’s stance is that rental car companies need to just “step up to pay those tickets,” as Loren Braud (a staff attorney with the Phoenix Municiple Court) put it. Perhaps the cost of having to remove a vehicle from impound – at around thirty dollars a pop – plus the collections and court fees on top of the original ticket, will deter the agencies from letting tickets fall by the wayside in the future, she suggested.

Rental car companies, however, counter that it is ultimately the rental customers’ onus to pay up if they should happen to incur a parking ticket in a borrowed car. The agencies claim that they try to get customers to pay up, but the city accuses them of not trying hard enough. At the end of the day, Phoenix says, it falls on the owner of the vehicle in question to pay any fines incurred under that car’s license plate number. Loan out your wheels to a little brother or sister? If they get a ticket and don’t pay, you’ll be the one in trouble. Likewise, rental agencies are ultimately the ones holding the legal buck when it comes down to who can get in trouble for all those unpaid fines.

Legally, all the city can do about unpaid fines is send unpaid balances to collections, and impound the vehicle in question if they can find it. They may not issue arrest warrants or sue anyone. There are four collection agencies employed by the Phoenix Municipal Court to track down delinquent car owners, but everyone knows that collection agencies can only get so far. Many tickets hang around for years, growing musty and frustrating city officials. One of the major issues involved in rental car companies demanding renters pay fines, the city says, is a ninety day statute of limitations on rental car companies charging violators for such things. Often, given the turnaround time on paperwork and all that, there simply is not enough time to effectively pursue those who owe money. Take, for example, national rental giant Hertz.

Hertz is in debt to the city of Phoenix for almost thirty-three hundred dollars in unpaid parking tickets. For these matters, Hertz has a contract with American Traffic Solutions of Scottsdale, a vendor that provides photo-enforcement and is supposed to deal with Hertz’s unpaid fines. ATS is meant to either give driver information to the city so that the appropriate person can be tracked down and held accountable for outstanding liabilities, or to pay for the ticket and then charge the customer in question the full fine plus a penalty and administrative fees. Hertz admits, however, that there is a lag time in handling these matters.

The largest debt on Phoenix’s books belongs to Southwest-Tex Leasing, a rental agency that owes no less than twenty-six thousand dollars in unpaid tickets. Southwest-Tex went belly up and filed bankruptcy two years ago, however, making it look dim that Phoenix will ever be able to collect on the debt. Southwest-Tex was formerly run under the umbrella of Advantage Rent a Car before Advantage was bought out by… wait for it… Hertz. Unsurprisingly, Hertz refuses to claim the original debts. The city bemoans the fact that it is pretty much impossible to get their hands on the original violators without the help of the rental car company in question. The cars that incurred the fines have likely been dismissed from the company’s fleet and sold to other owners, meaning that those tickets are unlikely to ever be punished.

Confusion between rental companies and the city seems to be a big trend. Phoenix city records show Enterprise Rent a Car (the company holding the largest rental fleet in North America) as owing eighteen thousand dollars in unpaid fines. A representative from Enterprise was quoted as claiming that a recent warning letter listed a fine of just five thousand dollars, however. Enterprise spokeswoman Laura Bryant dismissed the issue as one of “customer service” at the municipal court, and claims that her company has tried to work with the city on consolidating and simplifying the process by which information on violators is passed along, preferably by electronic media that might be quicker. Bryant said that, in the interest of maintaining good relations with the city of Phoenix, her company has “every intention of paying every outstanding and valid complaint we are responsible for.”