A New Canaan man last week got out of a $25 parking ticket after telling officials that he had been mistakenly targeted by enforcement officers downtown.
Peter McAleer told members of the Parking Commission during their regular meeting that he pays tickets when he’s in the wrong. Yet on the day in question, according to McAleer, he parked in his accustomed spot on Pine Street, where he works, at about 7 a.m. and stayed until 11 a.m., when he went to Stamford for a haircut and lunch.
He returned at 12 p.m. and was parked back on Pine Street for about 10 minutes when he was issued a ticket for overtime parking.
According to McAleer, the enforcement officer assumed, wrongly, that he’d been parked continuously in the same spot for the entire morning and into the afternoon.
“I have had at least 30 or 40 tickets, or more tickets, over my entire time working and I am very familiar with rules with two-hour parking,” McAleer told the commission at the Jan. 11 meeting, held in Town Hall.
“I must leave the street for over one hour [after two hours expire]. I played by the rules, and try to—sometimes when I get a ticket I certainly send it in and pay when I’m wrong. But there is something wrong with the procedures, I believe. In some cases, I think the [parking enforcement officers] who drive the cars that chalk the vehicles get to know the plates, get to know cars and make assumptions and a lot of times they are incorrect, as in this case. In other words, they see the blue car with the Florida State bumper sticker or whatever the case may be, and they assume they just went across the street and just moved the car. I guess some people do, but that is not a proper system or a proper procedure, if that is what they are doing. As they did in this case.”
Ultimately the volunteer body voted 2-1 in McAleer’s favor, voiding the ticket. Commission Chairman Keith Richey and commissioner Stuart Stringfellow voted to void, while Secretary Pam Crum voted to uphold. Commissioners Peter Ogilvie and Chris Hering were absent.
The ticket was voided even though the head of the Parking Bureau advised the commission that McAleer in this instance provided no details with his appeal, prohibiting her from preparing the town’s case in advance of the hearing.
According to Parking Manager Stacy Miltenberg, enforcement officers mark down on a spreadsheet what time they travel each street downtown and apply chalk to cars.
The practice is in place “so we have a record,” Miltenberg said. Yet in this case, she said, the appellant supplied no timeframe in advance of the hearing, so she didn’t have the parking enforcement officers’ schedule for Pine Street on the day in question at hand.
“Unfortunately, Mr. McAleer, if you see his appeal, just wrote down, ‘I want to appeal this ticket.’ I sent a letter back that he needs to explain a little bit more detail so I can get some background,” she said. “He didn’t give me any of the detail, so I cannot show you the time, because he didn’t write down what time he parked when he moved or where he moved from. So right now, it is his story and I have no background to show you, but if he had been a little more thorough, I would have been able to.”
Later, as the commissioners deliberated the McAleer appeal, Miltenberg added that she has spoken with McAleer before and “he knows the process.”
She said: “Mr. McAleer has appealed several other tickets in the past and he has actually written out why he is appealing. So he does know the process, and what we ask for.”
Crum noted that McAleer has “a very healthy history of tickets” and asked him if he was making the case that the chalk did not come off of his car even though he drove to Stamford and back.
McAleer responded that “clearly it came off” and that’s why he was questioning the parking department’s system.
“Here is what I believe it to be,” he said. “As I said, I park there every single day and I rarely get tickets. I know how the rules work … They see the car, they get to recognize through the license plate or through the make and model fo the vehicle, and I am saying the system is questionable in some cases. The driver makes assumptions that are incorrect. In this case, they clearly did.”
Richey during closed deliberations on the hearings said he would give McAleer “the benefit of the doubt.”