Quite the hullabaloo has greeted stories about a 19-year-old Bronx man being ticketed for sitting on a milk crate and an 18-year-old pregnant Brooklyn woman being ticketed for taking a breather on the steps of a subway station. Among other comical tickets reported in the Daily News recently, a Manhattan woman got a ticket for using outdated blue recycling tags to throw away her trash, a New Jersey man received a citation for having a loose passenger-side mirror, and a Brooklyn man was fined for, as the paper put it, “having an oven in front of his building.” All of this has lead to accusations that Mayor Bloomberg has directed the city government to let forth with a blizzard of tickets in order to help snow over the New York City’s budget gap. A report out yesterday from the Independent Budget Office, however, shows that the mayor has got ten a bum rap.

The only tickets that make money in this city are parking tickets, which brought in about $300 million in net revenue last year — and those are down 17%. As our Colin Miner writes at Page 3 of today’s New York Sun, the storm seems to be a fiction of the reelection campaign of the president of the Policeman’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch.

The greater scandal here may be the extent to which the city’s other ticketing operations have lost money. While the IBO’s spokesman, Doug Turetsky, lets the city off the hook by saying that the goal of ticket writing is “not just making money,” the fact is that some city agencies are not doing their jobs efficiently. Particularly problematic, according to the report, is the Environmental Control Board, tasked with handling many of the “quality of life” violations, such as some of those that have made the news recently. The IBO points out that the ECB does not issue notices of violations and does not establish enforcement policies. Still, roughly a third of the fines it is supposed to collect — on violation in areas such as street cleanliness, waste disposal, water and noise pollution, street peddling, building safety, and misuse of parks — go unresolved. The IBO report mentions one solution, though. We could sell outstanding ECB judgments to collection agencies. Maybe then the ECB would cease to have a deficit of $26.6 million.