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.
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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.
The Illinois Tesla began racking up its tickets in March 2023 and was ticketed as recently as last month. Most of the tickets were for parking in no parking zones, in addition to a handful for parking next to fire hydrants or at expired meters. The Tesla tended to pick up its tickets in more or less the same spot, on Locust Street between 7th and 8th streets, near the old Republic National Bank building.
In the wake of widespread reporting from SLM and other outlets about lackadaisical parking enforcement costing the city millions of dollars, some officials have expressed optimism that the city could still collect money from cars like the Tesla that owe five-figure sums.
“The cars that are sitting on those thousands of dollars worth of tickets are going to be towed and auctioned off,” Comptroller Donna Baringer told SLM earlier this week. “I believe 100 percent of the auction funds should go back to the city.”
But that’s going to be particularly difficult in the case of the Tesla. Over the past three years as it was steadily accruing tickets, it was using Illinois dealer plates. The Model S racked up $27,140 on one plate before swapping it out for another, on which it ran up another $14,960 on a different dealer plate.
And a spokesman with the Illinois Secretary of State’s office, which oversees dealer plates in the state, says both the plates are essentially bogus. One set, they said, is not associated with an active dealer and is of a design that hasn’t been active since 2023. The other plate—the one with $14,960 in tickets attached to it—is tied to a business that ceased operations in 2014.
“The use of expired dealer plates is illegal, and local law enforcement should be contacted if they are observed in use,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman added that people attempting to evade enforcement have been known to use expired or otherwise invalid plates to conceal a vehicle’s identity. This, the spokesman added, “underscores the importance of law enforcement intervention when suspicious use is observed.”
There are other ways to track down a specific car aside from its license plate. It is possible the Treasurer’s Office knows the vehicle’s VIN, or vehicle identification number. SLM reached out asking if the office would have that information in this case, but didn’t hear back. Previously, when the office provided a list of “boot eligible” vehicles, a number of them did have the VIN listed. However, in the case of the two plates associated with the Tesla, the VIN column on the spreadsheet was empty.
At a press conference yesterday, Mayor Cara Spencer described the millions of dollars going uncollected as “very frustrating.”
Though her frustration was doubled by the fact that under state law most of that money, were it to be collected, would stay in the Treasurer’s Office rather than in the city’s general coffers.
“I would love to see the treasurer’s office and parking come under the Streets Department, so that revenue generated on the streets can go back into the streets or go back into the general fund in a meaningful way,” she said.
UPDATE: Over the weekend, a spokesperson for the Treasurer’s Office sent SLM this statement in response to our request for comment: “The Parking Division tracks parking citations through a vehicle’s license plate, the standard method used for municipal parking enforcement. Our staff can also look up a vehicle’s VIN when necessary. Citations are issued to dealer plates, and when a vehicle does not have a license plate or only has a temporary tag, tickets may be written to the VIN.”
