Two Days Of City Sticker Mayhem

The reality is, enforcement on city stickers does not officially start until July 16th, as there is a 15-day grace period.

On Tuesday, at the Gale Street City Clerk's office, with lines stretching out the door of the small offices, one of seven computers went down for a few hours, slowing the line somewhat.

"We fixed it as quickly as we possibly could," said Kristine Williams, Information Coordinator for the City Clerk's office. Williams explained their IT crew tried to fix the problematic computer remotely, but when that couldn't be done, a repair crew was dispatched to the Gale St. location to solve the problem.

"As soon as they got out there, they restored service," said Williams. "That one computer was up and running in a couple of hours."

But Tuesday also saw a snafu on a different front. Area Currency Exchanges were having issues selling city stickers.

"Currency Exchanges had a server outage today," said Williams. "It is was totally unrelated to the city's (computer) servers and had nothing to do with the City of Chicago."

Electronic License Service, LLC,  (ELS) the company that provides the service that allows Currency Exchanges to access the City Clerk's city sticker database to sell city stickers to their customers was overwhelmed by a large spike in traffic. Essentially, all of the Currency Exchange operators were having problems accessing the City Clerk's servers.

The problem continued into Wednesday, improving mildly by the afternoon.

"We were a little slow Tuesday afternoon," said ELS's John Iberl. "But it was cleared up by Wednesday morning around noon."

ELS, the largest supplier of Chicago city sticker sales, also handles most of the electronic license plate renewal Illinois Secretary of State.

It seemed to be a perfect storm of sorts.

Part of the problem can be attributed to the sheer volume of people who erroneously believed they need to renew their city sticker by June 30th or face $120 parking tickets for not having a sticker.

In addition, because June is the busiest month for vehicle license renewal, the tremendous demand for both types of renewal on the last day of the month, saw internet access for these services slow to a trickle, leaving Currency Exchange operators and customers frustrated.

"It was our triple witching hour," explained Iberl. "People want to have their city sticker on their car in a timely manner. And June is the heaviest license renewal month for license plates as well. There are things within our control and things out of our control. We got things fixed as soon as possible."

Iberl explained that in addition to being the first year of the City Clerk's new print on demand system, it's also the first year for ELS's system for print on demand Chicago city stickers at local Currency Exchanges.

"Part of it is just growing pains," continued Iberl. "It's just the nature of the first year of the program."

Williams encourages people to call ahead to their neighborhood Currency Exchange to make sure everything is working properly.

Calls to a random sampling of local Currency Exchanges seemed to indicate the problems of the past few days is over.

"We had two days of misery," laughed an employee at one local Currency Exchange. "But we're OK now--knock on wood."