City of Denver to reopen online portal for parking ticket disputes

Got a bogus Denver parking ticket? Good news, online disputes are coming back.

If you’ve tried to fight a Denver parking ticket lately, you know the struggle. Last fall, budget cuts eliminated the city’s Parking Magistrate Office and shut down the online dispute portal. Since then? It’s been a mess.

To dispute a ticket, drivers had to physically go to the City and County Building, schedule a court hearing, then return months later to argue their case before a judge. That’s two trips downtown.

The result: more than 4,200 parking hearings have been filed since October — compared to just 88 during the same period the year before.

At least 14 percent of those hearings were tossed because city agents couldn’t even show up. Meanwhile, parking fine revenue dropped $400,000.

Now Denver says a new online parking citation review program is expected to launch by late summer or early fall.

No more taking a day off work to fight a $25 ticket. It will also ease the burden on the court where ticket disputes have exploded by 4700 percent.

Read more about the online disputes here on 9NEWS.