St. Louis city parking authorities really should have put a boot on a black Tesla Model S on one of the 350 or so occasions it parked illegally around town. Because now the more than $40,000 the car owes is all but certainly impossible to collect.
That’s because parking records are largely organized around license plates. And the Illinois Tesla—a car that itself has a $100,000 price tag—ran up its parking tab on two separate sets of seemingly bogus plates.
As SLM previously reported, The St. Louis Treasurer’s Office, which controls parking in the city, has allowed more than $10.7 million in parking tickets to go unpaid, with some vehicles accumulating massive fines without being booted or towed. City officials say the problem stems from the treasurer’s failure to maintain and share a current “boot list” or regularly immobilize vehicles, leaving other departments unable to tow scofflaw vehicles…