• Sending delinquent parking ticket notices to Michael
Jordan’s son. He attended the U of I University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – we did collect. • 2004 –Attending IPI in NewOrleans;meeting Gennifer
Flowers (Bill Clinton’s ex-girlfriend) at her restaurant&piano bar, shook her hand too; then in 2005, watching on TV the devastation that hurricane Katrina wrought to New Orleans and remembering our visit to the city the year before. All of the IPI and PIEconferences that I have attended
throughout the years have been educational and fun. I met a lot of great people and helpful contacts – one of the best resources you can have. OK, back to my job. Urbana has a population of 40,000
and Champaign, our sister city, 75,000, making an overall urban population of more than 115,000 people. Home of the U of I, the Urbana-Champaign population grows a good 30,000 when school is in session. When I began work in 1981, my Municipal Collector’s
Office staff consisted of two clerk cashiers, one half-time sec- retary and the office supervisor (me). Today, the only change is a full-time office assistant (former half- time secretary). My memories of those early years have to do with data
entry, data entry, data entry, and handling and filing lots of pieces of paper. At that time, Police Officers and Parking Enforcement Officers hand-wrote the tickets. This is how tickets were processed back then: Receive the previous day’s tickets; put in numerical
order; enter each ticket into our mainframe database; file tickets in pending-payment file cabinets; process each ticket payment (payments were received by fine box, mail and at the office service counter, with most paid in cash as the ini- tial meter violation fine was $2.); ticket payment envelopes were put in numerical order; the corresponding original paper tickets were pulled from the files; each envelope was opened with a manual letter opener (later on we bought an electric letter opener that saved a lot of time); the original ticket was stamped with the amount paid; ticket payments and money were each totaled and balanced; each ticket pay- ment was entered into our database; and filed tickets in “paid” file cabinets. We touched each ticket no less than 10 times. At that
time, we were issuing around 70,000 tickets a year. Meters were enforced Monday through Saturday, and office hours were Monday through Friday. On Mondays, the number of tickets to process was huge. At the same time, we were han- dling customers at the counter and phone calls. Mondayswere amadhouse. In 1979, we converted the tracking of parking tickets to
an IBM System 3, Model 4, and thought ourselves pretty high-tech. This initial mainframe purchase, and a contract with an RPGprogrammer, set the tone for the city’s future use of home-grown computer programs for, among others, police records, payroll, tax billings – and parking tickets.
Delora Siebrecht can be reached at
dnsiebrecht@city.urbana.il.us. At a June 7 Urbana City Council meeting, the Mayor proclaimed June 11, 2010, as “Delora Siebrecht Day in honor of her service to the City in the Finance Department.”
Note: Part 2 of “Three Decades of Changes” tells of how
personal computers and microprocessors have changed park- ing operations.
PT
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