No parking meter tickets have been written all summer on a Tuesday. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)
By DUSTIN RACIOPPI
Since July, Sunday has been the only day of the week you could park in downtown Red Bank without feeding money into the borough’s parking meters between 9a and 6p.
Or so we’ve thought.
Dating back to at least June 1, not a single ticket has been written for meter violations on Tuesdays. That’s either a whole lot of compliance or a whole lot of not enforcing overtime parking violations, which carry a $38 ticket.
redbankgreen scanned records for tickets on Tuesdays from June 1 to September 14 and found that no tickets were written in that time. Borough employees could not be reached on numerous attempts to find out if there has been enforcement on Tuesdays, and if not, why not.
Mayor Pasquale Menna says he knows nothing of a “concerted policy of no enforcement on Tuesday.”
“In the event that some people think there is, they will be sadly mistaken,” he said.
Word on the street, though, is that what had been a three-person enforcement team was reduced to two as part of the borough’s effort to rein in costs. Problem is, it takes the remaining pair of enforcers a full day to do the weekly collections from meters. Guess which day.
None of this could be confirmed by official sources, however.
This isn’t the first enforcement secret in Red Bank. Back in June, redbankgreen learned that there had been no enforcement of Saturday parking, which had recently been reinstated. Saturday parking was brought back shortly after the borough council doubled the downtown meter rates, and increased the permit fees by 33 percent, in an effort to make up for a revenue shortfall.
