One story that comes to mind is the license plate HPPYPPS, a plumber whose company Happy Pipes provided service around SF. He was subject to numerous citations on the order of $1k a month. When his van was towed, he likely did not have the funds to retrieve it, and it was subsequently auctioned. He now does business under the same name, but in Utah. It is interesting to think of how much tax revenue the city actually lost by fining a small business out of existence, which was likely much greater than the total punitive fines levied against him.
In the process of looking up companies that owned vehicles, S1 filings, and high-end cars that seem to accrue tens of thousands of dollars of fines every year, I grew exhausted and demoralized by the project and it has sat on my back burner for a year now. If anyone is interested in taking this up while respecting the privacy of those involved, let me know how to contact you and I'll share my data.
1. https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Cost of doing business yes, but things tend to get a bit tricky when cities wholesale outsource their parking systems to private agencies that are harder to keep accountable than city departments[0]
[0] https://www.governing.com/columns/mgmt-insights/Chicago-Park...
The only relevant guideline I found on parking citation data was that it is unlawful to look someone else up by their license plate. However, it is entirely possible for someone to do so without detection. My primary concerns, however, were ethical concerns - there were many people for whom you could determine their place of residence, place of work, and financial situation by their license plate's inclusion in these data sets.
I have my preconceived notions of what I'd find, but I think it'd be better to let the data speak for itself.
My email address is just philip at mccarty at gmail, and I would be happy to talk to you on phone/skype/zoom so you can see if you feel comfortable with me using the data for that purpose.
Or we could find a way to anonymize the data, as the personally identifying information isn't necessary for my analysis at all.
I'm not so sure about that, due to the nature of his business (plumbing).
There will be two broad categories of taxes that will be lost when a business moves away from San Francisco.
1. Taxes that are paid by the business itself, and
2. Taxes paid by individual employees of that business, such as income taxes and sales taxes, if those employees move with the business.
I'm not too familiar with San Francisco business taxes, but a brief bit of searching suggests that the bulk of it is a gross receipts tax and business personal property tax.
A plumbing business leaving San Francisco doesn't change the amount of plumbing that needs to be done in San Francisco, so presumably money that would have went to his gross receipts had he stayed just ends up in the gross receipts of some other plumber. I don't know if the gross receipts tax is flat or progressive, but if it is then the city might actually collect more on gross receipts with him gone.
The city will lose out on business personal property tax because presumably much of that goes with the business when it moves to Utah. Whatever plumbers in San Francisco get the work that would have went to him might need to increase their business personal property some, but it probably won't be enough to offset what is lost. A smaller number of bigger plumbers are going to be more efficient in this regards than a larger number of smaller plumbers, so any consolidation should lower the total amount of business personal property.
For the individual taxes, there are two groups to consider. First, employees who leave rather than move with the business. These probably have little impact. They still pay sales and income taxes--they just get the money for that from their new employers.
Second, there are the employees who move with the business. Their income tax and sale tax is lost.
If the city was hitting them with $1k/month in fines, that's $12k/year. Googling tells me the city income tax is a flat 1.5%, and the sales tax is 0.25%.
Let's assume that these employees spend half their taxable income on things subject to sales tax. Then they need to be making about $740k aggregate taxable income for their income plus sale taxes to be more than the parking fines. By "taxable income" I mean whatever it is that San Francisco charges 1.5% on.
Former HIPAA security officer here; to be abundandly clear, there _are_ very specific guidelines for which information must be anonymized.
I don't think you were saying the alternative, just sounded a little like "anything goes" which is definitely not the case.
As for your point about guidelines, that's entirely true - last time I read the section about encryption, it just specified "state of the art encryption" which is... a poor way to specify that.