3 On Your Side Solves A Four-Letter Parking Problem
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Imagine getting a parking ticket, calling up to pay, then finding out you're on the hook for more than $160 in additional tickets. On top of it, those tickets were written to cars that don't belong to you! That's what happened to one viewer. After trying to fix the problem for more than two years, she wrote to 3 On Your Side's Jim Donovan.
Marie Maciejewski of Woolrich Township, New Jersey couldn't believe what she was getting in the mail from the Philadelphia Parking Authority.
"They were sending me parking tickets, expired meters tickets, telling me that I had to pay these different tickets," she said.
It all started back when her son got a parking ticket. But when Marie called to pay, there were three more tickets: one for a Mercedes, one for a Volkswagen, one for another car. The total bill was $164!
Marie figured it must be a mistake. Those weren't her cars.
"Letter after letter, email, faxed them, everything, and nothing, nothing, came of it," she said.
The costs kept adding up, and when she would call to explain, she said she didn't get anywhere.
"I felt like I was just talking in the air, like I didn't exist!" she said.
That's when she called 3 On Your Side, and we got to the bottom of Marie's ticket trouble.
Turned out, a parking enforcement officer made a mistake typing on a handheld device. So on the ticket, there was a leftover code, "PANA," where the license plate number belonged. But PANA isn't a real license plate. It doesn't exist.
Corinne O'Connor of the Philadelphia Parking Authority explained, "Usually a parking enforcement officer, when they issue that ticket, they're going to realize, 'I just made a mistake.' They're going to call their supervisor. The ticket will be canceled on the spot."
But this time, the ticket wasn't canceled. And when Marie Maciejewski called to pay the ticket, her name and address were typed into a database as the owner of license plate PANA, and she was on the hook for three other tickets mistakenly written to it. That is, until 3 On Your Side called!
O'Connor explained, "The result was the other three parking tickets, two were, have been permanently canceled, another one she actually did pay and she's received a refund on that ticket."
Marie said, "3 On Your Side is absolutely the best! I wouldn't watch any other station!"
The Philadelphia Parking Authority says it routinely tries to cancel tickets that have mistakes like this, but they haven't caught them all.
If you get a notice in the mail for a car you don't own, call and ask how you can fix it. If that doesn't work, contact the public advocate of the Philadelphia Parking Authority.
LINK:
Philadelphia Parking Authority
http://www.philapark.org/contact_us.aspx
Reported By: Jim Donovan, CBS 3
