A Saskatoon man is speaking out after he says he was slammed with a number of parking tickets in the middle of the night without warning for infractions that are typically complaint-driven.
“I never got a warning over it, that was the issue,” said Micheal Groulx, who runs a construction company.
“If they would have just told me I can’t park them out on the road, I would have just found a convenient spot to park them.”
The incident that has left Groulx shaking his head goes back to Sept. 12 after he repaved his driveway. He says he got more than he bargained for – three parking tickets totalling $90 because his construction trailers were parked on a residential street outside his home.
Groulx said he checked in advance with all the neighbours to see if the trailers would be an inconvenience and they all said it was OK. He woke up the next morning for work to find tickets issued in a matter of three minutes in the middle of the night.
“It was the time at two in the morning and without a warning,” Groulx said.
“This is not the first time, a couple months ago I caught a guy around here at four o’clock in the morning.”
Groulx said he went to city hall but had no luck in having the tickets ripped up after feeling ripped off. He said the tickets clearly weren’t complaint-driven and it feels like the commissionaire was roaming around on the roadways looking for violations to crack down on.
“I’m opposed to the fact that we may have had a commissionaire out there for number of months looking specifically for infractions on the bylaw with respect to length of vehicles that are parked in residential streets – we have not done that historically,” Ward 1 city Coun. Darren Hill said.
On top of all this, Groulx said he was told specifically by a city inspector that he couldn’t use the driveway while it and the sidewalk dried over the course of the week.
“I’m surprised that commissionaire is there and see that this construction is happening and tickets anyway,” Hill added.
Hill said while there is a commissionaire that can issue tickets overnight, the type of infractions would be instances where someone has parked in an emergency bay blocking paramedics from accessing where they need to go.
Hill also noted that this case isn’t isolated. At least seven city councillors have received complaints about these sorts of ticket since the spring.
He said he will be filing a formal request to parking officials to get his hands on the number tickets that have been issued since January, what areas of the city they were issued in, what time of day and who has been issuing these types of tickets.
The headache these tickets have caused is big business, Hill says the loss in productivity for city workers is estimated to be in the hundred of hours.
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