Are Sacramento Parking Meters Unexpectedly Resetting?

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - Imagine you come out for a night downtown fill up the meter for the next few hours. But then you come back with time to spare and have a ticket. A Sacramento man says this happened to him and still isn't sure what why.

"I came out at 8:40 p.m. and I had a ticket that said I was ticketed at 8:17 p.m. and there's no way," Nicholas Snyder said.

Last Tuesday, he got a $42 surprise on his car, just two minutes before his parking meter was supposed to expire.

"There's just no way that I didn't put enough money in," he said.

He thinks the time on the meter somehow mistakenly reset. According to the city of Sacramento, each time a car leaves a parking space, the meter is supposed to reset to zero. The city says that ensures customers don't pay a higher second-hour rate for their first hour of parking as soon as they pull up.

But we wanted to know why Nick's meter would reset if he didn't go anywhere?

"They just said that it isn't impossible to happen, that's all I was really told," Snyder said.

But what if it did? CBS 13 found out, back in 2015, the city of San Jose used the same brand of parking meters: the IPS M5 Smart Meter with sensors. San Jose told us when large trucks drove by, sometimes the meter reset to zero minutes and drivers were getting tickets.

In a statement, San Jose says "..we've continued to monitor our smart meter/sensor systems, and we have developed internal review procedures that allow us to identify meter sensors that may need adjusting."

According to a Sacramento city spokesperson, the same error couldn't happen here. San Jose's sensors are in the ground and more susceptible to prematurely resetting. But Sacramento's sensors are up on the post, inside of the meter. The city says they detect large metal masses like cars - but are highly unlikely to reset because of a truck driving by.

After seeing several nearby cars get tickets that night, a skeptical Snyder wants the city to take a good look at the meters downtown.

"I don't think everybody was being grossly negligent that night," Snyder said.

Here's a piece of advice: as you first leave your vehicle, take a picture of your meter with a time stamp. If you have an issue, the city recommends calling 311 while you're still there.

Nick checked his complaint online on Tuesday and found out the balance on his ticket is now zero.