Dec 14, 2009 10:23 pm US/Central
Traffic Aide Peppers Residents With Bogus Tickets
Even Department Head Concedes Some Of The Citations Don't Appear Legitimate
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
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Residents of a South Loop neighborhood say they've been barraged with bogus parking tickets -- a charge the city doesn't entirely dispute.
CBS
It's one thing getting a parking ticket if you do indeed park illegally. But one South Side neighborhood says they have been blitzed in recent months with multiple bogus tickets.
CBS 2 Investigator Pam Zekman reports.
"It's not only a waste of my time, it's a waste of the city investigator's time," Bryan Keane said.
Car owners in Keane's South Loop neighborhood are angry because they say a traffic-management aide regularly sweeps through and writes bogus tickets.
George Lynch got a parking ticket for parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk, but there are no signs saying that it's illegal here.
"I've been parking there for 14 years, since I've been living here, and this was the first ticket I've ever received in that particular spot," he said.
Keane has received three tickets in recent months for parking too close to the crosswalk or a stop sign. Two were dismissed -- one by the aide's supervisor, who came out to the scene.
The supervisor "told me that my ticket was basically illegal and that she would take care of it," he said.
It's illegal because there were no signs prohibiting parking there. Keane is appealing the third and two other tickets he got for parking on street cleaning days. A sign on the street forbids parking there on Tuesday mornings between April 1 and Oct. 31.
"It's not a gray area," Keane said. "It's Nov. 3rd and Nov. 10th when I parked there -- I'm clearly not in violation."
Zekman asked the city's head of traffic management, Jack Killackey, about Keane's street-cleaning ticket and others like it.
"If this ticket was written for street cleaning, it's clearly wrong," he said. "I have no defense against it."
The traffic aide who wrote the tickets is Debra Taylor. In 2008, she wrote 715 tickets, but so far this year she's issued a whopping 1,792 parking tickets. We went to her house to talk to her, but she was not home.
"We're looking into this traffic control aide's activities, and we're trying to determine whether she was acting properly," Killacky said.
Lynch, one of the ticket recipients, said he thinks he knows why there are so many citations being issued.
"I think it's a revenue boost," he said. "They're trying to write as many tickets as they can now to boost the revenue."
Of course, Killackey denies that. But as a result of our inquiries all of the tickets issued to carowners in this report by Taylor have been dismissed.
Taylor also is under investigation for parking her own car illegally before going to work to write tickets for illegal parking by others.
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