Thank you everyone for your passion about downtown parking! Rest assured that the customer is king in downtown Duncan!
While Suzanne Anderson's particular situation was an unfortunate combination of circumstances that resulted in her slipping through the system to the point of getting a ticket; please let me explain how the City's parking enforcement functions.
• The new bylaw is simply a re-write of the old parking bylaw. These same re-parking rules have been functioning very well for over eight years.
• Although the re-parking clause of the bylaw reads that it apply to everyone, the City has never applied this to customers, and has no intention of doing so.
• The bylaw focus is to ensure parking is available for customers. The City collects far less parking ticket fines now than it did 10 years ago, because the enforcement is focused.
• The bylaw disallows re-parking so that employee and merchants cannot "shuffle" their cars to different areas of downtown throughout the day.
• To avoid getting customers caught within this rule, the City created a system of tracking and warning, prior to issuing tickets for vehicles that break the bylaw. The commissionaires use a license plate scanner to track license plates each rotation of downtown.
• The first time a vehicle goes over time, or re-parks downtown, it creates a notation in the system of that license number. No ticket is issued.
• The second time a vehicle goes over time, or re-parks downtown, it creates a notation in the system of that license number. No ticket is issued.
• The third time a vehicle goes over time, or re-parks downtown, it creates a notation in the system of that license number, and the commissionaire issues a warning (not a ticket).
• The warning notice states that if a customer is mistakenly issued a ticket while shopping or using downtown service, if they contact City Hall it will be cancelled.
• The fourth and additional time a vehicle goes over time, or re-parks downtown, a ticket is issued.
• The City periodically purges the older notations so that customers do not get caught up in the tracking. In the extremely rare instance a customer is ever issued a warning notice or a ticket because they are a frequent shopper, just give us a call at the office. The City's parking enforcement is, without exception, the most customer focused and friendly of any jurisdiction that I am aware of.If anyone has follow up questions, or would like to discuss their ideas for parking in the City, please give me a call any time.
Peter de Verteuil
Chief Administrative Officer
City of Duncan