This Poor, Abandoned Acura MDX Gathered $8,660 In Parking Tickets

This Acura MDX was once a nice car, Acura's best-selling vehicle, in fact. It's not the wildest car we've seen left to rust, but after a life that we can only imagine was hard-fought, this particular one was parked on Locust Street in St. Louis, Missouri, and abandoned last April. What makes this ordinary Acura notable is that rather than being towed away after a few violations, it accumulated $8,660 worth of parking tickets, reports KSDK. That's nearly twice as much in tickets as the car is worth, according to the best case scenarios for the Acura's value I ran through Kelley Blue Book.

The City of St. Louis considers a vehicle abandoned if it has been parked in the same place for more than five continuous days, according to the city's website. (It also has some rather draconian laws about parking on your own property, but those don't apply here.) Under normal circumstances, abandoned cars would be ticketed, booted, towed to the city's impound yard, and eventually auctioned off if the fines weren't paid. Instead, about 40,000 cars remain on St. Louis streets in violation of the law. Some, like this Acura, have been there for a long time.

City Treasurer Adam Layne told KSDK that the parking issue starts with a history of massive corruption at the city tow lot. Moneywise verifies and goes into the details of that story, which resulted in the towing program being shut down. Layne also said that the pandemic was a factor, and that the city wanted to give people "a nice window of time" to deal with financial issues without worrying about their cars getting towed. However, towing most abandoned cars has never really resumed, leading to situations like the MDX with all those tickets. It seems that shenanigans have continued with the cars that the city does tow, like the instance where they sold a recovered stolen car and pocketed the money instead of giving it to the proper owner.

Sean Hadley, operations chief for the Streets Department, says it's more of a staffing problem. He has five inspectors, but needs 12 to ensure adequate coverage of the city. While Layne says the city can't tow cars because the impound lot is full, Hadley showed KSDK that it was just over half full, holding 700 cars with a capacity of 1,200. "We're not at capacity," he told KSDK. "We haven't been at capacity since before the tornado."

That's not the only thing the two departments disagree on. According to a follow-up report by KSDK, the Streets Department has refused to sign an agreement with the Treasurer's Office to give it 60% of the proceeds from auctioning impounded cars, while the remaining 40% goes to the city's general fund. Current state law requires this, but the Streets Department wants to keep a share the money for itself. After all, it's the department actually doing the work. The departments are not playing nicely together, to say the least, so the agreement remains unsigned. 

Now a third player is getting involved: St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer. She thinks the entire situation is ridiculous, and wants to strip parking enforcement away from the Treasurer's Office, putting it directly under her office instead. From KDSK:

"I personally think that it's quite unfortunate and ridiculous that parking enforcement is handled in a siloed office that isn't controlled by the mayor's office," she said.

I asked if she wants that power for herself.

"I would, yes, absolutely," she said. "I mean, I think every other city in the United States operates that way."

Treasurer Layne disagrees.

"The mayor doesn't really understand how the parking division works and didn't understand it during her time as alderwoman."

If the parking division is supposed to work through corruption, losing half of the impounded cars from inventory, and missing money, both in the scandal Moneywise reported and millions in potential revenue just from auctioning the 40,000 abandoned cars littering St. Louis streets right now, perhaps the mayor is right to not understand this. Maybe she's right in wanting to take a system that's so broken it can't even perform its basic functions and fix it herself.

The city has also proven that it can still tow abandoned cars when it feels like it. After all the negative publicity this story brought to the situation, that Acura MDX with $8,660 worth of parking tickets finally got towed away. One down, 39,999 to go.