http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoNews/ts.ts-12-09-0048.html

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Thursday, December 9, 1999

Drivers off hook due to glitch

By DICK CHAPMAN, TORONTO SUN Prosecutors have withdrawn thousands of parking tickets issued in Mississauga because of a flaw in a provincial computer registry.

City spokesman Elaine Buckstein said yesterday her staff has taken temporary measures to fix the problem.

They're bypassing Mississauga's new, $350,000 computerized parking tag system and have gone back to taking paper copies of all tickets to court.

"We've withdrawn cases in court in the last two weeks," she said. She refused to say how many tickets were involved, except it was "much lower" than the 5,000 a source claimed.

"We've fixed the problem. We're looking to the ministry to fix (their) problem. I can't answer what the problem at the province is."

The issue became public when a justice of the peace asked a city prosecutor if Mississauga meets the requirement to register electronic court documents in the province's integrated court offences network (ICON), she said.

Mississauga's tag system -- 10 hand-held ticket dispensers and new software -- has been operating since July, she said, but ICON hasn't accepted city data.

For now prosecutors are taking paper copies of each parking ticket to court, she said. That means motorists can't duck fines due to a computer logjam.

Mississauga collects about $3 million in fines, she added.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 09, 1999

Answers

Notice how many "fixes" are a return to manual paper or the old system?

Soon There's No Turning Back

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), December 09, 1999.