Cleveland drivers who thought they had finally paid off their parking tickets may have had a surprise hitch in the process, thanks to a long-running workaround inside the city’s Clerk of Courts office under Earle B. Turner. An investigation, first reported by Signal Cleveland and summarized by Axios, found that staff quietly altered ticket payments for years, shifting small amounts between cases in ways that sometimes kept people from renewing their vehicle registrations.
According to former employees and internal records, clerks removed 1 dollar from some credit card transactions and applied it to different tickets, often older violations or traffic camera fines. That left the original ticket just short of paid in full, even though drivers believed they had cleared what they owed, and reportedly cost some people hundreds of dollars over time.
Turner declined to speak directly about the practice. His spokesman later described the dollar moves as a “workaround” for software issues, and the office says it stopped doing the adjustments last fall after consulting with the city’s Law Department.
How DETER holds trap drivers
The dollar shifting was especially painful for people already caught in DETER status, short for Drivers with Excessive Tickets Excluded from Registration. According to reporting on how parking ticket payments were handled, staff watched online and phone payments tied to DETER registration holds and sometimes deliberately pulled 1 dollar from payments that otherwise would have cleared a registration block…