Photo by ep_jhu.

On the same day that we found out that the District is owed $300 million in unpaid parking tickets, Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) announced this morning that she wants the city to have its own bounty hunters to track down scofflaws and make them pay up.

Okay, so maybe they won’t be bounty hunters in the Hollywood sense of the term, but Cheh’s proposed Central Collections Unit — we can hear it now: “oh snap, CCU is coming!” — would serve to collect on fines and penalties owed to the many city agencies, from the Department of Motor Vehicles to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

Currently, each city agency has to collect fines individually, and not many of them are doing a very good job. Case in point: of that $300 million in parking tickets, the city may only manage to recoup $6 million of it through an amnesty program. Similarly, Cheh noted, DCRA only collected on 25 percent of the fines it handed out during fiscal year 2009. Said Cheh in a press release: “We have left millions of dollars on the table. While debt-amnesty programs may address our current budget woes, they do not address the larger structural problem.”