Before Iowa State students leave for the summer, the Ames Police Department will be assisting with taking care of outstanding parking tickets.

Donna Scherr, legal services administrative assistant in the city attorney’s office, said hunting down unpaid parking tickets is something that becomes more important as students are being uprooted.

“We do it all year round, but this time of year, it becomes a little more rushed,” she said. “We want to make sure that students don’t leave things undone that will haunt them later. We just want to see people take care of their tickets.”

Scherr said police are being used to help serve warrants and summons to ease the process.

“We just thought that was another resource we could use to help serve these tickets,” she said.

Scherr said Ames police officers will have geographically categorized lists of people with unpaid tickets pending. All regions of Ames will be equally pursued, not just areas heavily populated by students, she said.

Although attempts will be made to track down all unpaid tickets, some will go unaccounted for, Scherr said.

“Probably 85-90 percent will be accounted for, but there are always going to be some people getting through the cracks,” she said.

Ames Police Chief Dennis Ballantine said collecting old tickets once was his department’s task.

“We used to do this exclusively, and we would almost make a special push this time of the year,” he said.

Ballantine said the city attorney’s office has handled unpaid tickets for the last couple of years, but he figured police were brought back into parking ticket enforcement because the attorney’s office became overwhelmed.

“I guess the back log was getting to be too much, so we decided to help them clear some of those up,” he said. “It would be a lot of work for only one person to serve all of those citations.”

Ames officers will be serving citations only while on duty, Ballantine said.

“They will have a list, and if they’re in a certain area, they’ll just knock on the door,” he said. “It’ll take a little extra time, but we think it’s worth it.”

It takes a long time before an unpaid parking ticket turns into a court summons or even an arrest warrant, Ballantine said.

“Typically, it would take at least a month before we’d go serve a citation,” he said. “It would take a minimum of four to six months [for an arrest warrant], and there would have to be some clear recognition that the city attorney had contacted the person. Anyone that has an arrest warrant on them should have had ample notice to get the ticket paid.”

Scherr said people with arrest warrants already have received a court summons.

“The warrant is just another step if a violator ignores a trial date or a payment,” she said.

As far as Scherr could remember, no Ames resident has ever actually gone to prison for an unpaid parking ticket.

“That’s something that’s at the judges discretion, but I haven’t seen anyone do time for parking tickets,” she said.