By Ted Kleine
Last year, the Chicago Department of Revenue booted 27,915 vehicles, an all-time high. This year, the revenuers’ busy boot crews matched that mark on August 1. A yellow boot now adorns a car on almost every city block, especially in the crowded north and west side neighborhoods where the booters do most of their work. The city’s been nabbing a lot more scofflaws since 1998, when it debuted the Chicago Adjudication and Ticketing System, which allows booters to troll the streets with a handheld console called an Auto-Cite, typing in license plate numbers.
You also won’t be able to hide your car in a garage, where the boot crews can’t touch it. After Rush made the boot a populist issue, the Revenue Department released figures showing that in a two-and-half-month period that winter, it booted 131 cars in the 27th Ward, a near west side neighborhood afflicted with both congestion and poverty. In the semisuburban 41st Ward, out by O’Hare, it booted five. In Beverly’s 19th Ward, six.
One Tuesday morning this summer, the boot crews caught up with a car belonging to a man named Xavier, who’d been on an illegal parking rampage. A few hours later Xavier emerged from the Department of Revenue’s Payment Center at 2550 W. Addison, clutching a stack of computer printouts listing all his unpaid tickets. He was going to have to cough up more than $1,000 to get his car rolling again, and he was livid.
Living in Albany Park, “he’s on side streets all the time, and he’s getting tickets,” Sergio said.
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That’s catch number one in the 22-plus catches the Revenue Department presents the indigent. There’s a $60 service charge for booting the car. If you can’t pay within 24 hours, your car is towed to an auto pound, which costs $110, with an additional fee of $10 for each day it languishes there ($20 per day after ten days). If you can’t pay within 30 days, the city crushes your car, or auctions it off and keeps the money. Then you have to buy a new car, but you can’t drive it until you settle up with the city, because the Secretary of State’s office suspends the licenses of drivers with more than ten unpaid tickets. Up until 1990, drivers were allowed to pay off tickets in installments, but over 90 percent welshed. Most people, Reyna-Hickey says, find a way to pay within 24 hours. If you pay within a day, a release crew rolls by and removes the boot. (The city champion scofflaw was a woman who ran up $23,000 in tickets. She paid on the spot.)
The boot business is experiencing “tremendous growth,” says Liz Wolfson, chief financial officer of Clancy Systems International, which owns the patent and the trademark on the original Denver Boot. (Chicago uses a knockoff manufactured by Palma, Inc., of Maryland.) The device was invented in 1953 by Frank Marugg, whom Wolfson describes as “a pattern maker, an inventor, a violinist” and a friend to several Denver cops. By the end of the decade, Marugg’s boot was in use all over the country by police departments that realized booting a car was much cheaper than towing it.
