WPCNR THE PARKING VIEWS. By John F. Bailey. May 28, 2008: It was a beautiful Memorial Day, a great parade, a moving Memorial Ceremony at the White Plains Rural Cemetery Monday. 

If you came to White Plains to see the parade, though, and did not know White Plains parking regulations are enforced even on holidays, it cost you a $15 Parking ticket – aggressively, ruthlessly, sadistically enforced by the WP Parking Enforcement Officers.  

Even though the long parade prevented the memorial ceremonies from beginning until 11:40 AM – no slack, no tardy parker was spared – except perhaps parkers at the American Legion Hall on Mitchell Place after lunch, but we do not know that.  WPCNR has a call into City Hall to get an exact count of how many tickets were distributed during parade hours into the early afternoon. I wait with baited breath.

Thank you for celebrating Memorial Day in White Plains, $15 Please!

When I say the tickets were aggressively pursued, I mean aggressively pursued.

This reporter is fully aware of the Parking Enforcement Officers and their hand-held ticket rayguns. I parked in the municipal lot, deposited $2  in the parking machine for 2 hours and 40 minutes, figuring the ceremony would be over by noon. Well I got back to the mobile unit at 12:45 P.M. My ticket was waiting for me – I was 10 minutes too late and a number of other cars in the lot were ticketed. I mean were they staking out the cars?

$2 bought 2 hours and 40 minutes of time for a 45 minute parade and 30 minute ceremony...Within 10 Minutes a Parking Hawk Swooped Down and Ticketed -- Gotcha! What hospitality!

What a dedicated job! Fill those coffers at the expense of White Plains’ reputation in the county. It is a mini-mugging. The ticketing blitz should be held off until 2 PM when all the parade barricades and normal parking returns to normalcy -- or the policy of ticketing on traditional holidays should be suspended. It sends an nasty, small, petty message, though the fine is far from petty.

I was not the only car victimized. They were giving tickets because they could. I was aware of it, but simply could not walk back from the Rural Cemetery in time to downtown to pick up the car, primarily because it took an hour to get the ceremony going after the parade had cleared the downtown.

But how many citizens headed in to see the parade and the ceremony were victimized unknowingly?

 How many persons seeing their  slap-in-the-face ticket on their windshields –decided to leave immediately and not lunch or dine or go to the movies as planned – spending far more than any $15 ticket would bring the city?

How stupid is this parking policy? Pretty stupid!

The Common Council should look into this. And stop allowing the Parking Department which kicked in $10 Million in profits last year, to execute policies that do not make good public relations sense. The city according to its Moodys Report is in great shape. Could we ease up on the fines on holidays?

Considering most towns do not enforce on-street parking regulations on national holidays, it creates extreme ill will to visitors who come into town for a parade and it costs them a $15 “gotcha.”

The same rigorous enforcement does not significantly  appear to be applied to the more traffically incorrect maneuver of the double-park, particularly on Mamaroneck Avenue and Main Street which appears to be rarely ticketed, even when spotted, and appears to be tacitly ignored. That should be a $250 ticket, at least, because it creates a traffic hazard.

WPCNR awaits the city count on the Memorial Day Ticket Count.

I tell you this reporter had one writer last year write in and complain about their ticket, and once burned by a White Plains traffic ticket – you won’t come back.

On July 4,  Labor Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and Day parking regulations should be suspended throughout the town, not used as a sucker play that costs White Plains a consumer every time they get a ticket and significantly cuts down on the people who will visit White Plains in the future.

Get rid of it.

As the Mayor's Office is fond of saying, we are in great financial shape, we do not need the money any more.

The $15 I will pay on this ticket, still leaves me a $12 left of my $27 tax cut the Common Council gave me last week. Thank you! Thank you!

I say Common Council, Tear this Holiday Ticketing Policy up!