Hundreds of people who attended events last month at PPG Paints Arena and paid hefty fees to park at nearby surface lots were wrongly ticketed through the mail by a Denver-area company.
On Thursday, a top executive with the company, Parking Revenue Recovery Services, acknowledged the screw-up and said the motorists will receive discounted parking at the arena in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood.
Tickets were wrongly processed for 822 vehicles that parked from May 2 to May 23 in five privately owned lots during five events, including concerts by rock bands Heart and Greta van Fleet, according to John Conway, a company co-founder and its executive vice president.
The company caught many of the notices before they were mailed, but 629 fines were sent, each for $88, Conway said.
Of those, Conway said, only a dozen were paid.
On June 6, the company refunded the 12 people who had paid the erroneous fines, Conway said. The company also mailed apology letters, some as recently as June 18.
A third letter now is en route to Pennsylvania. It contains a one-time QR code for discounted parking at the area.
“The issue has been resolved and those few individuals who paid the fine have been reimbursed,” said a spokesman for OVG360, the Oak View Group division selected in 2022 to manage PPG Paints Arena. “Additionally, as a customer service gesture, anyone who mistakenly received a fine will receive a 25% coupon for their next parking reservation.”
“It was a mistake — we admitted to it and we fixed this,” Conway added. “This is not common. I would love to blame it on a computer glitch but this was human error basically.”
Previous problems
The third-party parking operator, which was founded 23 years ago and is based in Centennial, Colo., started collecting parking revenue about four months ago at five Uptown lots — three on Centre Avenue and one each on Logan Street and Washington Place.
The company manages about 850 locations across the U.S.
In Pennsylvania it handles parking only at the Uptown lots and performs data collection for a resort in the Poconos.
The error in Pittsburgh was not company’s first problem associated with its ticketing.
Last August, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser announced a $75,000 settlement with the company after an 18-month-long investigation by his office found that it illegally collected or attempted to collect on parking fines.
Some motorists told the attorney general they paid to park but entered the wrong license plate or did not pay within a 15-minute grace period at a lot operated by the company.
A spokesman for the attorney general’s office on Thursday referred TribLive to a prepared statement available online and declined further comment.
Conway defended his company.
“They couldn’t find anything,” Conway said. “Basically, they wanted us to pay their legal fees.”
In Pittsburgh, the five “special events” during which motorists were wrongly fined near PPG Paints Arena were an eclectic bunch: comedian Tom Segura, psychologist Jordan B. Peterson on his “We Who Wrestle With God Tour,” rapper NF, rock band Greta van Fleet, and rockers Heart and Cheap Trick.
Parking and data
The data collected for Conway’s company by computers and handheld units used to scan credit cards at the lots is valuable. Substantial money sits at the intersection of parking and technology, experts say.
The worldwide market for “smart parking” is expected to grow to $5.9 billion by next year from $3.8 billion in 2020, according to a study released Jan. 17 by Towne Park, a company that bills itself as a “parking and hospitality solutions provider.”
Pittsburgh was an early adopter of that “smart parking” technology: in 2012, it became the first U.S. city to adopt pay-by-plate technology.
In July of that year, the city installed the first 12 of about 550 multi-space, electronic parking meters that accepted credit cards and track vehicles by plate number. Then-Mayor Luke Ravenstahl posed for photos in front of the new meters.
Parking also is a local revenue generator.
Pittsburgh Parking Authority has grossed $26 million a year in parking garage fees and $19 million to $21 million a year in street-meter fees since the end of the pandemic, according to David Onorato, the agency’s executive director.
Those figures remain about $6 million to $7 million short of the year-ending totals from before the pandemic, he said.
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The 2024 budget in Pittsburgh is offset by more than $10.5 million in parking-meter revenue this year, according to city documents.
The authority hardly oversees all Pittsburgh parking.
Onorato estimated it controls about 28% to 32% of parking-garage spaces Downtown and in Station Square on Pittsburgh’s South Side.
The authority boasts about 10,000 metered spaces citywide and 11 garage facilities in the central business district, Onorato said. By comparison, Alco Parking Corp., a privately owned operation, manages 15 garages and lots in Downtown Pittsburgh alone.