By JOHN T. WARD
This week’s snowstorm was no match for a January blizzard, both in terms of of the amount of white stuff left behind and the number of parking tickets issued by Red Bank police.
In contrast to the ticket blizzard that racked up 260 parking violations during the January 4 and 5 storm, the latest storm prompted just 25 tickets, police Chief Darren McConnell told redbankgreen.
“We took a measured approach due to the lower accumulation and the warm forecast for [Thursday],” McConnell said via text. “We only wrote summonses on streets where cars were creating a potentially hazardous condition.”
Just a few inches fell Wednesday, and thanks to sunshine and temperatures in the 40s, quickly melted away Thursday. By contrast, the early January  storm that plopped about a foot of snow on Red Bank.
The early-January ticket blitz was an apparent record, about two and a half times the number written in comparable past storms, McConnell said at the time.
The blitz, he said, followed the borough council’s passage last year of an ordinance amendment that expanded a ban on parking during snowstorms to all borough streets. Previously, the ban applied to about two dozen streets considered essential for emergency service, he said.
The intent of the ticket blitz, he said, was to free the streets of cars so borough plows could clear them curb-to-curb without having to make repeated, and costly, return trips.
