City tows legally parked vehicles (followup and rejoinder)
Remember a couple of weeks ago when KTRK-13's Miya Shay posted on her blog about a car that got towed because of the city's parking-spot-rental program, and we wondered if Parking Management busybody Liliana Rambo read it?
Well, it seems as if both Rambo and someone at the Chronicle reads Shay's blog, as the intrepid Hearst daily ran a similar story on Monday. It wasn't entirely a copycat story, though, as Ms. Rambo had to weigh in:
When a space is rented, a parking enforcement officer puts a no-parking bag over the meter the night before.
Spaces are free overnight, but paid parking resumes at 7 a.m.
So if a space is bagged during the evening after a car is already parked there, the driver is expected to move the car before 7 the next morning.
A local TV station reported recently that a driver returned to his car one morning to find it had been towed because parking enforcement officers had turned the metered space into a rented one overnight.
Rambo said the driver failed to return to his vehicle by 7 a.m., and his vehicle was towed about 9 a.m.
Had the meter not been bagged, he would have been ticketed for failing to pay the meter instead of being towed for parking illegally.
"That person was parked there more than 14 hours," she said. "You will not get your vehicle towed because we happen to bag a parking meter."
The Houston Police Department calls for a tow once it's requested by the person who rented the space, Rambo said.
That's nice of the Parking Management busybody to clear that up two weeks after the fact, but that's not exactly the situation that Shay described on her blog. Indeed, in a rather pointed post, Shay followed up on the matter yesterday:
Hey, this is a blog! It has a name! Or, heck, just write ABC 13! On top of that, the vague reference was inaccurate. I did not write that the meter was bagged overnight. In fact, there was a witness who told me the meter was not bagged until that morning. I know it's supposed to be bagged the night before, but we're all suppose[d] to do a lot of things.
Maybe in two more weeks, the Chron and Ms. Rambo will have another followup!
Anyway, just to make sure we don't get on Shay's bad side, once more that's Miya Shay's KTRK-13 Political Blog. ;)
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/12/06 10:09 PM | Print |
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