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De Blasio donor owes city $200K in tickets – Metro US

De Blasio donor owes city $200K in tickets

De Blasio donor owes city $200K in tickets
Michael/Creative Commons

Support of the mayor apparently doesn’t equate support of the city.

A former car-rental businessman who held fundraisers to elect Bill de Blasio as mayor and has donated about $1,000 of his own money to his campaign is on the hook for almost $200,000 in unpaid parking and speeding tickets, the New York Daily News reported.

Gil Cygler sold his company, Citywide Auto Leasing, in June to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, but did not transfer over the debt, which includes $171,396 in parking tickets alone. The company had operated in eight locations in Brooklyn.

“Enterprise didn’t buy any debt. The customers would be liable for it,” Cygler told the Daily News, expressing no intention of paying the debts himself.

Cygler’s company was enrolled in the city’s Rental Program which allows businesses to transfer tickets to customers, but apparently the transfers did not happen.

“I don’t know if they were transferred over,” Cygler said.

National rental companies such as Hertz, National and Thrifty have no unpaid tickets on records, the Daily News pointed out.

The Bloomberg administration announced a plan in 2010 to track down the top offenders, such as Shabaz/Wahwood, a person or company listed on city records as owning $448,328 for roughly 2,000 tickets. However, because that offender and others have out-of-state addresses, recouping the money has proven difficult.

The city can seize assets and place liens on property in such cases, but apparently has not done so in Cygler’s case.

The Finance Department “is actively investigating this case as well as the other debtors,” a department spokeswoman said. “We do not have specific results that we can share at this time but we have set up an internal Task Force . . . so the resources of several offices can work together on resolving them.