Think You’re Safe From the Boot? Think Again.
According to Beth, on the morning of June 28 she parked her car as usual near the Metra station in Rogers Park, boarded the train, and went to work. When she returned around 5:30 she saw a big orange sticker on the driver’s side front window. “As soon as I saw that sticker,” she says, “I knew I got the boot.”
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Yet there was the boot. She got on her cell phone and called 311. “I got a guy who transferred me to someone in the revenue department who wouldn’t do anything. I told him, ‘But I only have one outstanding ticket.’ He said it was ‘boot eligible.’ I tried to get him to clarify what boot eligible means. Is there some category of tickets we don’t know about? He just kept saying, ‘It’s boot eligible.’ He refused to have the boot taken off.”
The next day she went to the city’s administrative hearing office at 400 W. Superior to pay her fine and get the boot removed. “I had to get there within 24 hours of having been booted, because after 24 hours they will tow you–and I didn’t want to be towed,” she says. “If you get towed you have to pay a storage fee and even more money. As it was, I ended up paying about $150 to get rid of the boot. It’s a total racket.”
Wow.
Beth says the clerk at the administrative hearing office tried to explain the rule to her. “The lady who took my money told me that because I hadn’t paid off all of my old tickets, I was eligible for the boot. I said, ‘But the law doesn’t say you’re eligible for the boot if you had outstanding tickets, it says you’re eligible if you have outstanding tickets.’ It says right here on the boot sticker I got, ‘have three tickets.’ I think it’s reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of people believe that they have to have three tickets to get the boot. Well, they could be in for a big surprise.”
In my June 25 column Dan Korn was proudly riding his tall bike around Daley Plaza at the city’s Bike to Work Day rally. Now he’s in the dumps–his bike was stolen. “I have no one to blame but myself,” he says. “I should have known better.”
