City Government Can Work

Today in the mail I received a letter from the City. Upon viewing the envelope and noting that it was from the City, I suddenly felt that sinking “oh shit, what now?” feeling that one gets when they receive a piece of mail from a body of authority. Luckily, it was in response to a call I placed roughly a month ago about a parking ticket.

On Wednesday, July 19, as the ticket reminds me, I was having a working lunch at the City Diner on Grand, which I parked across the street from. As I went in, I jokingly told my lunch companion that she was my witness that the meter at which we parked was broken – I did place money on top of the meter. As soon as we came out, we could both tell I had gotten a ticket, and the money on the meter was gone. After dropping my companion back at her office, I called the phone number on the back of the ticket, was greeted by a nice lady, and was walked through the process of filing a request to have the ticket reversed. Well today, a month later, I received the letter in the mail telling me that I was indeed correct that the nickel in the meter jamming it and causing no other coins to be able to be deposited qualified as a broken meter and that the ticket had been reversed.

Now, a week after I received the ticket, I shared my experience with a friend in local government who offered to have the ticket “fixed.” She stated that “they” can’t be trusted to correctly resolve the issue. I’m glad it did not take using back channel methods to have the problem resolved, and that the procedures in place worked. So, the moral of the story is that our City’s government does work – give it a chance, it just might surprise you.