The City of Butler is taking action to make sure that parking equipment is functioning accurately.
After recently being made aware that the city’s parking meters had not been certified by an independent certified inspector in the past five years as required by law, Mayor Bob Dandoy stated that council does not find the situation “acceptable”.
One of the remedies that the city is moving forward with is getting Butler’s Director of Parking credentialed by the state so that he will be able to certify all meters as soon as this week.
“The Director of Parking, Jimmy Chipprean, will be certified himself to start certifying the parking meters, which is done through the state. We get the equipment and they certify that and then we’ll have someone else look at that. Then he’ll be able to certify all the meters,” Dandoy said.
While the meters are in the process of being re-certified, Mayor Dandoy has also directed parking violation enforcement to be a little less stringent.
“I’ve instructed the parking monitors to give a lot of leeway when it comes to giving tickets to be generous in that leeway. They’re not going to immediately write a ticket when a meter expires,” Dandoy said. “We’ll be giving people a little more extra time before they write any tickets or do anything like that.”
Dandoy would not comment on any specific cases of malfunctioning meters resulting in false violations but he did say that the city will be looking into more modern methods of monitoring parking including the possibility of replacing the 600 city parking meters with kiosks.
