Illegally Parked? No Problem for Gov’t Vehicles

New York Times: …And a Battle Over Permits: Judy Stanton, president of the Brooklyn Heights Association, had just left a meeting about how hard it was to park locally. As she and a neighbor walked back home along leafy Clinton Street, they kept their meeting going, as the neighbor complained about illegal parking on Aitken Place, a narrow, blocklong nook just west of Borough Hall.

Vexed, the two decided to take a look.

As Ms. Stanton remembers, they found a bonanza of violations. In the window of one illegally parked car that caught her eye was a permit from the city’s Department of Buildings. Despite the permit, she said, the car should not have been there.

When Ms. Stanton approached a police officer, though, the officer said, “No, we’re told not to ticket any government vehicles,” Ms. Stanton recalled.

Twenty minutes later, after she spoke on the phone to the officer’s supervisor, she said, the officer ticketed the car after all. Although Ms. Stanton left feeling happy, she was only mildly so, suspecting that “it would be business as usual as soon as I walked away, and the next day and the next day.”

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