Any chance of reducing my mountain of parking tickets?

[Roo2]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)?

California

I ran into a bit of a problem last week regarding my vehicle: I somehow managed to forget where I parked it. I'm a graduate student and my car spends almost 100% of its time in our school garage, but I parked it on the street next to the gym and somehow forgot that I put it there (and indeed I have no recollection of doing so). In any case, I spent all of last week in the blissful misunderstanding that my car was safely in the garage. When I finally realized this past Sunday that it was missing, I found it along with a stack of 8 parking tickets totaling $430, which is no chump change especially for a student.

Do I have any chance of getting the tickets reduced somehow? I read online about people going to court and asking the judge for a reduced fee, but I'm not sure how to do that. On the ticket the only instructions are to either pay the fee or contest the ticket in court (and I don't contest my idiocy). Would asking for a reduction be considered a contest, or is there some other way I should go about it?

The other confounding issue is that CA requires smog checks within two weeks of entry. I have a fairly new Toyota which I'm sure exceeds all of the standards, but due to being busy and only driving the car once or twice per month, I've kept forgetting to get it checked. I'm planning to do it next time I drive, but I'm sure the check would be dated. Would this issue be likely to come up on court?

Thanks for any advice.

Edit: One more thing - half of my parking tickets correctly listed my registration expiring in 2014, while the other half say 2015. Not sure if it's something I could use, but I though I'd throw it out there.

 

[justalayman]

Do I have any chance of getting the ticket reduced somehow?

"the" ticket? Which one did you want to address?

 

[TigerD]

Yes. Start writing a mountain of checks.

DC

 

[FlyingRon]

Yes. Start writing a mountain of checks.

DC

Actually, it just takes one check for a mountain of dollars.

 

[Roo2]

Not sure what I did to piss people off... Anyway, the consensus is that parking tickets cannot be reduced?

"the" ticket? Which one did you want to address?

Tickets. My apologies for the typo.

 

[justalayman]

Not sure what I did to piss people off... Anyway, the consensus is that parking tickets cannot be reduced?



Tickets. My apologies for the typo.

it's not that you pissed anybody off. It's just that with the tickets being valid, not much to do other than pay them. Everybody is basically having fun at your expense.



one suggestion though (and no idea if it applies or not):

some areas do not allow a ticket to be issued and then followed by another ticket in less than some specified period of time. If your area has any such rule, check to see if all of the tickets were written with that time limit in between each ticket. If the time period was not honored, then at least that ticket would be able to be argued. Seeing that it appears you got roughly 1 ticket per day I suspect it would not benefit you but at least something to look into.


as to the smog check; I doubt it would be an issue with your parking ticket. I suspect it may allow for some penalty or ticket based that issue alone but I don't think it would have anything to do with the parking tickets.