When we left off, I had grudgingly decided to go ahead and pay the (unwarranted) parking ticket, because my only other option was to go back to the City Court building, file an appeal, and wait for some assigned court date--all of which was way too much trouble to go to for an $11 ticket. Plus, I had been told Judge John Rosson wouldn't/couldn't talk to me about parking-meter policy matters as long as I had a ticket pending. So I mailed in my check, waited for it to clear, and called Judge Rosson. He called me back, and we had what ended up being a series of phone conversations that I can only characterize as diligent. He listened to my assorted concerns, asked intelligent questions, and when I presented him with questions in return that he didn't know the answers to, he researched them and called me back. He also repeatedly assured me that anyone who appealed a parking ticket would get a fair hearing in his court.
The net result of all of this was the determination that the existing policy that I think is faulty--the one whereby the response to a report of a malfunctioning meter is to go check the meter, and if it's working, you still have to pay the ticket, even if it wasn't working at the time you made the call--actually predates Judge Rosson's time on the bench. And he's been there since 1989. Which means it also predates entirely the current generation of electronic city parking meters. As I suspected, it was devised in an era of cruder mechanical meters that, in general, were either broken or not. In the 1980s, or whenever this policy was written, it probably made sense: Someone reports a broken meter, you go check the meter, if it's broken, you say, "OK, parking ticket dismissed." If it's working, you say, "You're a liar! Pay up!" But the current meters aren't like that, as I think I've exhaustively detailed previously. Most of the time they work. Sometimes they don't. When they don't, they're not permanently or completely incapacitated. They might register every other coin. They might work fine a few hours or days later. So as a way of backstopping and validating complaints of malfunction, the spot-check mandated by the policy is simply long out-of-date. And it is essentially useless as any kind of remediation. You end up calling people (like me) liars, who are not at all lying. And who don't appreciate being treated like liars by their representative government.
Not surprisingly, in fact, nobody even knows where this policy came from. It's on the website of City Court, which is why I was calling Rosson about it, but he says it's not his policy (and therefore he doesn't have authority to change it). It has most likely been copied over from the old website, and got onto there because it was standing practice in City Court at the time. Rosson's supposition is that it might have been set by administrative order of some long-gone mayor. It does not appear in any city ordinance, as far as Rosson can determine. Among other things, this is a nice object lesson in the inertia of bureaucracies. Some standard of behavior or conduct is established at a particular time for a particular reason, and then tends to persist for years and years afterward, passed on as enshrined dicta long after the intial impetus and even the initiator himself are lost to memory. But anyway, because it apparently came from the executive branch of our local government, and Rosson of course represents the judicial branch, he can't just change it by fiat. Which sends me back, again, to the City County Building. Apparently if the policy is to change--which I think it needs to, at least temporarily until the city can certify with some confidence the reliability of its electronic parking meters -- change will have to come from there.
But from whom? I don't know. Inquiries are under way. More to come.
(Oh, and on a sort of where-are-they-now note, apparently Richard Wingate, the City Court administrator who figured heavily in episodes 1 and 2, is with us no more. When I called City Court and asked for him by name this week, I was told he had departed. Rosson confirmed to me that he resigned last Friday, for reasons unrelated to any of this. I already miss him.)
CODA: I wrote this post last night. As a sort of comical exclamation point to it, this morning I tried to park at a meter on Central, just down from the State Street garage. And, shockingly, the meter I happened to pull up to (a meter I used just last week sometime with no problem) refused to register the coins I dropped in. For the hell of it, I went ahead and put in a dollar in mixed coins and filmed the whole thing with my iPhone. I'll put the video up on Facebook later, if I can get it to load. Here's a photo of the offending machine, mere seconds after eating my money:
It has, of course, been duly reported to 311. This time, maybe in a sign of something, the 311 guy advised me I should probably move my car. I assured him I already had. But I hope the city puts my dollar to good use. Maybe it plus the $11 I paid for the parking ticket can help fund a Center for the Study of WHY DON'T OUR PARKING METERS WORK.
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