Wilmington considers privatizing parking tickets

Private employees could soon replace city workers writing parking tickets on Wilmington streets.

In its ongoing effort to cut costs and increase revenue, the city of Wilmington is thinking about outsourcing its parking ticket writers to a private company. Wilmington Chief of Staff Bill Montgomery says they’re considering the change because the city’s been unable to improve productivity among ticket writers for several years. He says, “It may be a bit of frustration, but we’re reaching out to the private sector to get their ideas on how it might be done more efficiently.”

Montgomery says there have been no decisions made about privatizing the ticket writers, but the city is exploring it’s options.  “We know that [private companies] are interested in it, and we know that they can probably show some significant savings, but I don’t want to prejudge that, we’ll see what comes out of the request for proposal first.” The city hopes to get those proposals back before the mayor presents his budget proposal to city council next month.