Cristy Garcia has been with parking management only since February 1998, but she learned about the plight of neighborhood parking in her first week. One night, while she was working as a parking-control agent on call--roaming the city freely, scouting for violators--she cruised through a residential neighborhood near the Auraria campus. There she found a mother lode of students taking advantage of the free parking. She also found a warm reception from desperate residents.
"The people who lived there were so happy to see me," says Garcia. "There hadn't been anyone there in weeks." She says one resident even thanked her personally. "Each time I came by, he would wave and say, 'Thank you.'"
Now Garcia splits her time between taking phone calls and giving tickets. She has received several calls from Jeff Conn.
She has never met the man, but much like an FBI profiler working with a few scraps of information, she has put together an impressively accurate composite. Garcia has figured out where Conn lives, knows that he once worked for a radio station and can even mimic his gesticulations.
"I can see him walking," Garcia says, pumping her arms. "He's always out of breath when he calls, using his little cell phone."
She raises an imaginary phone to her ear while she keeps one arm moving. "He has a very distinctive voice," she adds.
Conn may be a pest to dispatchers, but he is quick to point out that his perennial phone calls created perennial enforcement in his old neighborhood.
C.J. Musman agrees that his agency responds to complainers but emphasizes that it conducts surveys and makes analyses before targeting an area.
"It's always the squeaky wheel, isn't it?" Musman asks of the well-known Conn.
Musman claims dispatchers have caught Conn disguising his voice.
Conn denies the accusation, saying "I've got nothing to hide." He calls Musman a "big liar."
"We should give him a ticket book and deputize him," Musman quips. But Musman also says Conn often calls in cars that aren't illegally parked.
Grumbles Musman, "As a matter of fact, I think his middle name is 'Wolf.'"
After Jeff Conn hangs up with dispatchers at parking management, he continues his early-morning hunt. Just past Governor's Park, the nose of a Jeep Wrangler sticks out over the sidewalk. Conn can walk around it easily, so he doesn't call it in. "A lot of times, cars restrict traffic flow and create a safety hazard," he says. "These rules were made for a reason, and safety is a pretty good reason."
At Pennsylvania near Ninth Avenue, Conn strains his neck around the corner and sets his eyes on a white Saturn with its back end hanging into the red.
"Think we got another one here," he says--then sees a yellow ticket flapping beneath the windshield wiper. "Oops, maybe not."
As Conn continues on, he says he is not against drivers who park illegally. "None of my business," he says. Instead, it's the inefficiency at parking management that really upsets him. Conn views the city's new enforcement strategy as "probably bureaucratic bullshit, but if they actually do something, that'd be great."
People in several of Denver's neighborhoods now hope the same.
But if someone were to suggest that Conn is overshooting his target--causing relatively innocent people to get ticketed in the crossfire of his one-man war--Conn acknowledges, "They're right." As he strides up to the Norwest building, 25 minutes after leaving his home, Conn says he feels bad about calling in the Chevy Lumina. Says he was hamming it up a bit, playing a joke.
"I don't want to be seen as a snitch," Conn says. "This is not what this is about. This is about getting good enforcement so we don't have to keep calling."
Before Conn puts his cell phone away, he says he's going to call parking management about the Chevy.
"I'll tell them it moved," he says.
