Topeka ? The day after Christmas 2001, Cathy Marcotte walked out of work at Southwestern Bell in downtown Topeka, across the street to her car and scooped seven parking tickets off the windshield. She shoved the stack in her glove box next to tens of others.

She was in the middle of a dissolving marriage, so the tickets meant little to her at the time. Indeed, she would go on to wrack up more than 300 such tickets from the same parking meter in the coming months, a record for the city of Topeka that would eventually have Marcotte in debt for more than $31,000.

She said she accepts responsibility for the tickets, but nearly eight years later she questions whether the amount is reasonable.

“You want to recoup costs and penalties, I get that,” the Topeka woman said. “But when the interest is nearly equal to the principal, there’s something diametrically wrong.”

Larry Zimmerman, an attorney working for Thomas Valentine’s law office representing the city, said he couldn’t comment on Marcotte’s specific case. But he had a simple response to questions about complaints on the amount of interest: It is the law.

‘Being stupid’

Marcotte was 27 in late 2001, and the relationship she had been in since high school was crumbling. Every day for months she parked on S.W. Sixth Street across from work. Nearly every day she accumulated up to seven tickets.

“It was just me being stupid, going through a divorce and not wanting to deal with anything else,” she said.

City code stipulates first parking violations are $10. Every ticket after that on the same day is $15. If not paid in 60 days, all tickets ratchet up to $60.

By the summer of 2002, Marcotte’s debt was big, somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000. One letter from Zimmerman’s office dated Oct. 10, 2002, shows a balance of $4,100 for 258 tickets at $15 a piece plus interest.

Throughout this period, Marcotte said she received varying account balances. She disputed the amounts in correspondence with the city and Zimmerman’s office.

Marcotte said it was difficult to keep track of the cases, each including varying numbers of tickets.

“I am currently in a quandary concerning the amount of this debt,” she wrote to Valentine in June 2002. “It does not seem to be coinciding with the information I had received from (the city).”

At some point she had a deal with the city to pay something along the lines of $4,500 to resolve the entire matter, Marcotte said. But then the debt was sent over to Zimmerman’s office.

Catherine Walter, an assistant city attorney, said debts not paid in 75 days automatically go to collections.

“The problem is she never followed through and made any payments,” Walter said.

Bulging debt

By November of that year, everything exploded. A record provided by Zimmerman’s office to Marcotte showed one case had ballooned to a balance of $18,000. That is because the hundreds of tickets that were $10 to $15 were now all $60.

Records show Marcotte was in constant communication with Zimmerman’s office and at various times was on a payment plan of $50 to $100 per month. In June 2003, she asked Zimmerman’s office if she could settle for $15 per ticket. Zimmerman said he is always willing to work with debtors and is obliged to take such offers to his clients.

“But I can’t make debts go away unless a client agrees or a court says so,” he said.

The interest was adding up, too. Between August 2002 and July 2005, Marcotte had accumulated more than $6,000 of interest.

Creditors have a statutory right to 10 percent, Zimmerman said. Marcotte said she was still making payments when in July 2005 garnishment proceedings began. Chunks upward of $600 were being taken out of her paycheck. She said if she was paying money, any money, toward the debt, the court shouldn’t have started taking her wages.

Zimmerman said decisions on garnishment depend on the type of case and that debtors have ample opportunity under the law to dispute the garnishment.

Haunting mistake

At its peak, Marcotte’s debt totaled $31,800. Since then, her garnishment payments have removed all of the $13,600 of interest and have paid another $4,700 on the principal. Right now, she still owes $13,500.

Marcotte considers herself a responsible person who went to college and had worked the same job for 13 years. The lapse in judgment was out of character, she said. She wants to take responsibility but wonders if her total debt was too much.

“When do we draw the line between holding someone responsible and bankrupting people?” she said.

Zimmerman said debtors can always dispute fines with a valid legal reason.

“But ‘I don’t want to pay that because I don’t want to pay that’ isn’t a legal dispute,” he said.

Marcotte has married a new man and is helping to raise her child from the previous marriage. But she finds it difficult to move on.

“It’s going to be a mistake that haunts me forever,” she said.