MORGANTOWN — Don’t lie.
Got any unpaid parking tickets?
If so, you’ve got options.
You can pay them.
You can ignore them and hope your car doesn’t get booted.
Or, thanks to a new partnership between the Morgantown Parking Authority and Pantry Plus More, you can help someone have a happy Thanksgiving.
The Pantry Plus Thanksgiving Food Drive starts Monday and runs through Nov. 9.
During that time, you can have an expired meter ticket excused by donating from a list of eligible food, laundry/cleaning and hygiene items.
The program is for expired meter tickets only. If you like to park along yellow curbs or in front of fire hydrants, you’re on your own.
Each customer can have as many as two old tickets taken off the books.
Items will be collected between 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday at the MPA office in the Morgantown Public Safety Building.
Just show up with an eligible item to donate and the ticket or the license plate number of the ticketed vehicle. It doesn’t even have to be your ticket.
MPA Executive Director Dana McKenzie said the purpose of the program is twofold.
The first, he told members of Morgantown City Council, is to be of service and help fill a need within the community.
The second is to begin clearing a mountain of unpaid tickets.
“There is no statute of limitations. [The tickets] can be two, three years old. To be honest with you, that’s kind of what we’re hoping to focus on is getting the old ones off the books for donations. That would be great,” McKenzie said, explaining roughly 16,000 tickets issued between 2018 and 2021 have gone unpaid.
Those numbers, he continued, are despite a 93% collection rate. Let that sink in.
Depending on how this initial run turns out, McKenzie said MPA is looking at a similar effort next August focusing on school supplies.
“It’s giving back to the community, but it also kind of highlights that citations are expected to be paid,” Morgantown Mayor Jenny Selin said. “I think it’s a nice kind of way that somebody can choose to turn something they probably consider a negative experience into a positive experience through your organization, so it’s kind of cool.”
You can see the list of eligible donation items and use your license plate number to check for unpaid citations at parkmpa.com.
