Several employees of ASU’s Tempe campus Parking and Transit Services have revealed questionable practices within the department, including unofficial ticket quotas and student employees’ betting on who can write the most tickets each shift.

Derek Lawson, a political science senior and former employee of PTS, said a group of workers regularly bets on who can issue the most citations, targeting cars parked in handicap spots because the $200 fine is more than any other ticket.

“Everybody’s shift ends at 2:30 [p.m.] and when they get back, the first thing they do is compare how many tickets they wrote,” Lawson said.

A current employee who didn’t want to reveal his or her name for fear of retribution confirmed that these issues have occurred throughout the past several months.

After working for PTS since August 2008, Lawson said he was terminated last month because he tried to appeal a citation that he said was unfair because it was issued after his car broke down.

“It’s different to comment from the sidelines, but I was inside the game,” he said. “I was a player. I played for this corrupt team.”

Lawson said employees who don’t issue the unofficial demand of eight to 10 tickets per hour are reprimanded and could potentially be fired.

PTS, a self-funded department within ASU, does not have a ticket quota, director Theresa Fletcher said.

“In fact, in training, our employees aren’t ever encouraged to write ‘X’ number of tickets per hour,” she said. “It is not the expectation that any of our enforcement officers meet a quota.”

However, Fletcher said supervisors can tell if employees aren’t writing enough citations by looking at both the area where they were assigned and the data about parking offenders in the vicinity.

But PTS communications specialist Leona Morales confirmed that parking enforcement officers are absolutely never told to meet any type of citation goal under PTS’s official guidelines.

Though Lawson said he was never personally pressured to write more tickets than he normally would, he said he heard other employees being questioned by superiors and told to write additional tickets.

“I was the quintessential Parking and Transit guy. I wrote a lot of tickets,” he said. “[Other employees would] get pulled into private meetings and be reprimanded if they weren’t writing enough tickets or wrote too many warnings,” he said.

Because the service is self-sustaining, Lawson said he was never surprised to hear workers be instructed to ticket more cars.

“They’re funding themselves. It’s like a cop getting paid for each ticket he writes,” Lawson said. “It’s obviously in their best interest to write more tickets.”

PTS funds transit options on, around and between campuses, including subsidizing 100 percent of the cost for student U-passes for Valley Metro buses and the light rail, Morales said. The service also helps fund the Orbit and Flash bus systems in Tempe and shuttles between campuses.

Betting on who can write the most tickets is a “fun game” employees play, Lawson said, adding that the person who issues the least often buys lunch for the others.

Fletcher said there are no contests of this nature among management-level workers, but “if employees take these sort of measures on their own we have no way of knowing.”

“The department does not sanction that type of activity in any way,” she said.

Lawson that said while it was difficult to lose his job and have to seek new work quickly, he is glad to be done with PTS.

“This institution preys on a very vulnerable population, which is students,” he said. “ASU, the organization that gave you your degree to take into the world, is also robbing you.”

Reach the reporter at tessa.muggeridge@asu.edu.