Dan Burzon with his message of hope.
redbankgreen‘s first instinct when we saw Dan Burzon pull a rectangular piece of paper off his car windshield yesterday was to offer condolences for his $38 parking ticket.
But it turns out the 18-year-old Red Bank Catholic student from Brielle hadn’t gotten a ticket. Rather, he’d employed a novel anti-ticket strategy.
The envelope contained 50 cents and a handwritten plea. (Click to enlarge)
Burzon explained that that he’d been concerned when he arrived on Broad Street at 7:50a that putting $2 into a meter for the maximum four hours of parking wouldn’t cover him until his noontime dismissal from school.
So he put two additional quarters into an envelope and wrote a note to Red Bank parking enforcement. It read:
“If I am held up and cannot get to my car in time, please have mercy, inside are two quarters. It would be great if you just did me that favor rather than ticket me.”
“I figured if I left change, the cops would be nice enough to put in the money for me,” he says.
The strategy went untested, though. Burzon found the envelope untouched, and no ticket, on his windshield when he returned.
Burzon tells us he didn’t realize that tickets were $38. “All I knew was that it was a lot more than fifty cents,” he says.
Because of the Good Friday holiday for borough employees, acting parking authority director Gary Watson was not immediately available to tell us if Burzon’s request might have been honored.
