APS Healthcare of Bethesda, Inc.

Thank you for addressing the issue you encountered at one of our locations.  Although we are not able to remove the violation for failure to pay, we have adjusted your fee to the original $23.00. Unfortunately we are unable to reduce the fee any further for the following reasons:We use the...

services of Passport Parking, a national parking access control and enforcement company, which also handles the distribution of  collections letters to our customers.  That is the reason for the $3.00 service fee.  We also use Passport Parking for customers to pay and appeal citations.  In addition to onsite payment for parking, Passport offers services for daily parking, with a 35 cent convenience fee, since the customer does not have to be physically present in the lot in order to pay for their parking. .  Our enforcement fees are directly in line with the current industry standard as adopted by numerous municipalities and private parking operators.  Our goal is to consistently provide safe convenient parking for all customers by ensuring that all spaces are available to paying customers using our locations.    The lot in question had machines that were not activated and covered in plastic.  These machines were not yet in use at the location in question.  However the honor boxes were still in the front of the lot. and customers were paying as expected in those honor boxes.   We have attached a picture of the empty slot from the day in question.  The picture is also available on our website.  There was also a sign on the lot with options to pay by phone by the aforementioned Passport Parking if the customer does not have the cash needed to pay the honor boxes.

Many of our lots are labeled "Public Parking". This means it is open to the public to park there, however this does not indicate that they are free. In the area around the Cultural Arts Center, we have surface lots where there are machines that customers can pay. There is a sign on the machine that...

is clearly marked "Pay Here" and there is also a sign with our phone number on it for any questions or comments. There is also a service called Passport Parking which allows customers to pay by phone when they are not in the lot itself at the time. The lot usually used by Cultural Arts Center patrons is $3.00 after 12:30 PM and many Cultural Arts Center students use our services for this reason. The checkers employed at our company are told to write citations when they see someone park their car and walk away without paying. It is likely that they saw you walk away from the lot, they checked to see if you paid via Passport Parking and then they wrote a citation. They have no way of knowing that you were not aware that the lot in question is a pay to park lot. If you were unable to access the website, there are other ways to dispute the citation, such as by email or by phone. We are open Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM-5:00 PM. We answer all emails and we strive to be as fair to our customers as possible. If you let us know what the citation number is, we could reduce the fee to the $3.00 night rate. If you mailed in a check to us, we can return it or destroy it, based on what you want us to do. There is no way we would be able to say that we did not cash as check from you, it would show on your bank statement that we had received and cashed the check.