Last week was typical for the city’s top three parking violators. UPS racked up $458,090 in tickets, FedEx accounted for $264,435, and Verizon came in third with $221,425.

That’s money that even a company like UPS, which reported $3.3 billion in net income last year, would prefer not to pay. And in the past, UPS – along with at least nine other companies – fought the city on every ticket. That became dramatically clear after Mayor Bloomberg nearly doubled parking fines in late 2002. Since then, the amount of parking fines assessed by the city has increased to $866 million in 2004 from $536 million in 2002, according to a 2004 audit by the state comptroller.

The result has been traffic, though not the kind found on the city’s streets.

On the dockets of administrative judges hired by the Department of Finance to collect the fines owed the city, the contested parking tickets of a select few – most notably UPS, FedEx, and Verizon – piled up, unresolved because of challenges made by the companies on various grounds.

Meanwhile, the average wait time for people seeking a hearing has gone up. In 2002, before the fine increase, most people could get a ticket resolved on a lunch break. A year later, the wait time jumped from 26 minutes to 40 minutes. Delays also have mounted for tickets contested through the Internet or by mail. The wait nearly doubled this year to 55 days from 30 days in 2002.

All of this was due, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, to the increased volume in summonses.

Trucks belonging to corporations that make their livelihood delivering goods across the city were to blame, as a contract sent to FedEx by the Department of Finance, the agency in charge of collecting parking fines, makes clear.

“Finance has paid more than $600,000 for administrative law judge hours solely to adjudicate the summonses issued to commercial fleet vehicles and additional $4 million for processing costs,” the department said.

That contract, which was dated July 6, 2004, and obtained by The New York Sun, was one of 10 signed by the city beginning last summer as part of a pilot program to bring the most egregious parking scofflaws to heel, reduce the cost incurred by the city to adjudicate each ticket, and unclog the bottleneck for ticket hearings.

The 10 companies that have signed on the pilot program, known as the Stipulated Fine Program, include Coca-Cola, Time Warner Cable, and FreshDirect, as well as a mom-and-pop flower delivery company called Fellan Florist. Together the 10 companies that are part of the pilot program account for 10% of the 10 million tickets the city issued last year.

In exchange for waiving their right to time-consuming and costly hearings, the companies receive reduced fines.

Parking in front of a fire hydrant, for which UPS was ticketed 276 times last week, normally brings a $115 fine, for example, but under the program, companies pay $98 a ticket for that infraction. Last week’s tickets for that offense, according to a bill sent by the city to UPS, will cost UPS $27,048, instead of what might be called the ticket price of $31,740.

The fine for parking at an expired meter, normally $65, is completely waived. The $115 fines for double-parking – for which UPS vehicles got $86,135 in tickets last week – also are waived for the companies in the program.

It amounts to a multimillion-dollar plea bargain, but it is one that both the city and the enrolled companies said is worth making. Last week, UPS, FedEx, and Verizon paid an average of between 52 and 59 cents for every dollar of parking fines assessed.

“While these agreements say the program has to be revenue-neutral, the truth is we are coming out ahead because of what we are saving on processing, as are the companies,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Finance, Joanna Perlman, said. “So it’s a win-win for both.”

UPS, which joined the program in September, paid $8.3 million in fines last year, according to the Department of Finance. The company received about 168,000 tickets during the year and, with the help of an employee based in Manhattan and hired to adjudicate each ticket, won its fights half the time. While the amount UPS receives in fines varies with the seasons, the company is on track to pay in the neighborhood of $10 million this year.

The company recently renewed its six-month contract.

“We are thrilled to be a part of the program that helps streamline the payment of parking tickets,” a spokeswoman, Diana Hatcher, said. The parking tickets, in a city with few options for deliveries, is the “cost of doing business in New York,” she said.

Neither FedEx, which paid $9.4 million in parking fines in 2004, nor Verizon, which paid $3.2 million last year, would comment on the program.

The city plans to open the program to any company with delivery vehicles, as it did for the president of Fellan Florist, John Laskaris, who said tighter building security has meant longer wait times and more parking tickets for expired meters and double parking.

He received $8,000 in tickets for his two trucks last year, and unlike some large corporations such as UPS, which has 1,000 delivery trucks on the city’s streets on a normal weekday, he did not have the wherewithal to contest the citations. “I was paying them like an idiot,” Mr. Laskaris said. “For a small flower shop with two trucks that’s a lot of money.”

The city launched a similar program in January for passenger vehicles.

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Trail of Debt

For anyone looking to see how much money an individual or a company owes the city for, say, unpaid parking tickets, Room 109B, as in basement, of the New York County Clerk’s office is a special place. It is the repository of records of debts to the city and property liens, records such as the New York City Parking Violations Bureau Judgment Docket Book.

That electronic tome, compiled by the Department of Finance, contains information on unpaid parking tickets and interest incurred, such as the more than $17 million purportedly due the city from UPS. But a mayoral candidate would be unwise to begin spending that money. UPS “disagrees adamantly” that it has any unpaid parking tickets outstanding, saying its debts with the city are clear and every bill sent to the company is paid within five days. And the Department of Finance concedes that the $17 million is its mistake.

“That’s our fault,” an agency spokeswoman, Joanna Perlman, said, though she could not say for sure how to account for the $17 million in unpaid parking tickets. She attributed the discrepancy to the department’s antiquated database, which includes two separate systems: one for collecting fines and one for paying them. The two systems, she said, “were not talking to each other.”

Some of the fines may also stem from a lawsuit brought by UPS against the city in 1989 when the Department of Transportation was in charge of collecting unpaid tickets, Ms. Perlman said. That lawsuit stemmed from tickets the company received that were later determined to have been written by rogue traffic agents who were loafing on the job. Another 2,000 tickets on the docket book are unaccounted for.

Ms. Perlman said the department was unaware of the $17 million under UPS’s name on the docket. She said the company does not owe the money.