West Fargo Police Chief joins WDAY Midday to addresses parking ordinance criticisms

(West Fargo, ND) -- West Fargo's Police Chief is explaining his proposed parking ordinance and police office system changes he outlined last week to the city's commission.

Police Chief Dennis Otterness joined WDAY Midday to clarify rumors he has heard about his own proposal. He began the conversation talking about the less controversial topic, specifically looking to increase efficiencies. He is looking for an update in software, which would reduce the workload and amount of repetitive processes needed to be done for each citation they write.

"We really are operating kind-of in the stone ages, "said Otterness, calling the current systems in place redundant and too intensive on his already busy staff, "Our staff is already stretched pretty thin, we run pretty thin right now with the number of people we have both sworn and not sworn. To ask them to now start to manually digging through all of these drawers of hundreds, if not thousands, of tickets to tally up how many dollars in outstanding fines... I just don't think it's good use of staff time."

Otterness also addressed the "boot" controversy, a decision he says is a compromise made to reduce costs for vehicle owners. He says the boot fee is much less than the fines that would be paid to free an impounded car.

"We were trying to come up with a middle ground when we came up with the idea to boot vehicles, "said Otterness, "It's probably two to three-and-a-half times more expensive for our residents to get a vehicle out of impound than to have a boot removed from it."