Lakeview Man Says City Giving Him Runaround On Tickets
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A young musician from Lakeview who has lived in the city only a few months has already racked up an avalanche of tickets and he says he has the city is being unfair and has led him astray.
The city says the man is "brazenly" disregarding Chicago's parking regulations and deserves the tickets he's received.
As CBS 2's Mike Parker reports, rock guitarist Andrew Miller has been deep into the real life blues for months.
Miller said last fall he sent in a check for a new license plate sticker for his car. He says the sticker was weeks late in arriving and that over the next few weeks, he got a total of 13 tickets on his Honda for $50 a pop.
Miller decided to fight the tickets and went to the Revenue Department at City Hall. They sent him to the city Hearing Center at 400 W. Superior St. They sent him back to City Hall, then he was directed to return to the hearing center. Through all this back and forth, the fines doubled to $100 each.
"Their options are 'Let's get money, let's get revenue, let's get going," Miller said. "I feel like it's just a big loophole. They're just sending everyone in a big circle. They're not giving citizens the opportunity to tell them … what happened."
Mike Brockway, operator of the advisory website called The Expired Meter and calls himself the Parking Ticket Geek. He said, "the city does a good job of enforcing, but does not do a very good job of educating the driver what your responsibilities are."
Brockway said that includes information on how to fight tickets.
The city's Deputy Comptroller issued a written statement saying, "Andrew Miller is subject to the same rules and regulations as everyone else. …This is a case of one individual brazenly disregarding the rules."
Meanwhile, Miller said he doesn't know how he'll pay the fines on those 13 tickets, plus seven others that he's received.
"There's a lot of fees, a lot of fines," he said. "I'm going to have to move out of Chicago."
It appears that the officers who wrote all of those 13 same-violation tickets were within the law. They're allowed to keep writing and ticketing the same car for the same offense every 24 hours. Miller said he doesn't think that's fair.
He's since gotten the license plate sticker he needed, so is no longer being ticketed for that.
--CBS 2 Political Producer Ed Marshall contributed to this report.
