Director: Parking Enforcement is a Fact of City Life

In Middletown, saying the following two words is a guaranteed conversation starter — "parking ticket."

It's the bane of city living. Run inside the library for a minute to pick up a book? Risk a ticket. No change in your pockets and your credit card is at home? Good luck.

The city's parking authority has two monitors on foot downtown on weekdays and one on Saturdays, making sure that motorists are feeding the meter. Time expired means a $10 ticket that doubles if not paid in 14 days.

Being issued a parking ticket for not adequately feeding a meter is a fact of life for Parking Director Geen Thazhampallath and his staff, who acknowledges some folks don't take kindly to being on the receiving end.

"People don't like it, but that's what we have to do to keep vehicles moving on Main Street and on our side streets."

Last week, Main Street Middletown resident Alyssa Landry tells Middletown Patch she and her boyfriend saw a parking authority officer violating parking laws by leaving his van in front of a fire hydrant, an obvious fire hazard.

That complaint, Thazhampallath says, was taken very seriously. He gathered parking authority staff and asked them to be mindful of where they are parking. "I make my employees aware of policies and procedure and where they're putting the car," he says. 

Citizens have contacted Thazhampallath's office, saying they saw the parking authority van in a parking spot and not feeding the meter.

Thazhampallath says he understands and entertains complaints about his officers, "if it's a legitimate reason, but asking me to feed a meter, it doesn't make any sense. It's generally an unreasonable request, because what you're asking me to do is — I'll have to ask police cars to put money in meters — so basically the chain would be I'd be paying the meter to feed ourselves," he says.

Although he fields many complaints, some, from the city's perspective are less than reasonable. "I've had people ask me to ticket police officers who were parking on Main Street," he explains. 

The city's parking authority was formerly incorporated into the Middletown Police Department, and like the common thought that officers have a monthly quota and are more aggressive toward the end of the month, Thazhampallath says the parking department suffers from the same misconception about giving out tickets.

"We don't have any set number, any directive, ways to ticket people. They go out and enforce the laws that are on the books and I know people like to believe we are out there to get particular people or we jump out of bushes — that's not the case. I tell my people to be as open as possible." 

"You can't miss someone coming down the street with their yellow flak jacket on," Thazhampallath says. "We make it pretty obvious that we're out there." 

As for re-instituting the 10-minute free parking policy placed on hiatus last December due to mechanical failure, Thazhampallath says by early summer he hopes the vendor will be ready with upgrades to the system. "I'm not going to revisit that technology until they can guarantee me that can have a high accessibility and high availability rate with their product."

Meanwhile, parking spots on Main Street are 25 cents per quarter-hour and city lots are 75 cents per hour, with the first hour free.

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