When it snows, it pours

By Scott T. Holland
Associate Editor

December 06, 2006 12:03 pm

— Every so often, a brave soul will ask me why I got into the newspaper business.
I usually don’t have a good reason, other than the obvious (too small, slow and uncoordinated to play Major League Baseball), but I typically can come up with a pretty good list of things that didn’t draw me into a career in journalism.
It wasn’t the money, because there isn’t much; it wasn’t the fame, because there’s even less of that; and it certainly wasn’t to spend a lifetime waiting to pick up the phone and never having any idea who or what is on the other end.
Case in point: Friday.
As pretty much everyone with halfway decent vision and a window knows by now, it snowed Thursday night and Friday morning. What those people may not know is that the newspaper office is one of the places people call when snow isn’t removed to their satisfaction.
I’m sure City Hall got a lot more calls than I did, but Friday was typical of one of the perks of this post: trying to talk people off the proverbial ledge with nothing but quick wits and a bag of promises.
One man called me around 8 a.m., which is not a great time for me to take phone calls. But I always pick up, just to see who’s on the other end. This particular caller clearly was angry, but, to his credit, he remained cordial to me and directed his rage toward the city.
As he explained it, the man lives outside of town but was parked overnight in Clinton, on the same street where his vehicle was burglarized a few weeks back. He walked out to his car Friday morning to find a ticket for violation of the calendar parking ordinance.
Upset that the cops had time to write him a ticket but not find the dude who made off with $3,000 worth of his stuff, he told me he called the police chief (cussing only once, he said) and then the city attorney, with whom he left a message. As a non-resident, he was unaware of the calendar parking rules and felt the city does a ridiculously poor job of posting its policy.
He was worried about the time it would take to go to court to fight the fine — through he was prepared to do just that, with photographic evidence and everything — but hadn’t yet heard back from the city attorney.
Look, I understand where he’s coming from. He’s not from here, he’s already mad about getting ripped off and now he has a $50 ticket. But it would be irresponsible of me to give his story legs until after he’s spoken with the attorney.
My suspicion, which I explained to him, is that the attorney would accept his story and forgive the ticket, while at the same time explaining the rules in order to avoid a repeat occurrence. If not, I told the caller, give me a call back and then we have something.
At least this gentleman called the attorney first. A woman called this summer upset about a dispute with her landlord over a leaking toilet, yet she seemed to have no desire to contact the proper authorities. What kind of boat does that put me in? If your neighbor backs into your car in your alley but won’t accept blame, call the insurance company or the police first.
It’s not that I don’t want to help people, but if you feel you’ve been screwed over, yet won’t take advantage of recourse the law allows, what good can I do? Imagine how much goes on in small claims court every week and how many of those people wish the newspaper would run front page stories about their cause.
Back to the snow caller. In our conversation, he and I came to an agreement about a course of action that would have made much more sense. When calendar parking goes into effect each Nov. 15, the city should send out police officers to issue warnings to all violators.
It’s a two birds with one stone solution. First, people will get either a reminder about calendar parking or at least an introduction to the rules. Second, if people heed those warnings, then perhaps on a day more than two weeks later when we have actual snow, the only cars parked in the wrong place would, theoretically, be intentional violators who deserve their tickets.
Do our police officers have time to write a bunch of warnings? Maybe not. But would it be easier than trying to plow around cars parked in the wrong place, and then to field calls from those vehicle owners later that morning? No doubt.
The city has a hard enough time clearing snow as it is, it doesn’t need the bad PR of parking tickets to go along with it. Calendar parking is a great law for many reasons, but it should be integrated into an overall snow management policy that can be analyzed and administered from the top down.
Until then, all of the parts will continue operating as fragments of a whole, and I’m pretty sure that means my phone will keep right on ringing.
Scott T. Holland’s column appears every Wednesday in the Clinton Herald. His e-mail address is scottholland@clintonherald.com.

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