Have an unpaid Town of Gander ticket? You might want to hold on to your cash

Gander's town council is writing off unpaid tickets between 1987 and 2007 — about $104,000 worth of fines — because it would cost too much to track the money down.

Council made the decision last week, on the recommendation of the Public Works and Services committee.

"Each of the tickets are for a small amount of money," said Deputy Mayor Cyril Abbott. "So to send them out to a collection agency — nobody is going to take that on."

Abbott said the town does a yearly operating budget with an assumption some money will be brought in through fines for bylaw violation, but added this chunk of cash has been internally written off for some time.

"After a number of years when we haven't seen the revenues come in for those tickets then we start to set them aside as kind of a bad debt reserve if you will," said Abbott.

He said that the unpaid fines and tickets could belong to people who have left the province or have died.