They had a wonderful time at the party, but when they returned to their car two hours later, they found an unwelcome surprise: a $20 parking ticket on the windshield. The city employee who'd issued it was still there, and a museum staffer came outside and promised to take care of the confusion: After all, the parking lot is owned by the museum, not the city. So the Giovanettis went home, but when they called the museum to follow up, they were told that the city's parking management division couldn't do anything about the ticket. The Giovanettis would have to go to court.
They weren't the only ones. On that same day, approximately thirty museum guests and employees received parking citations -- even the museum's van got a ticket.
Tucker Wagner was among the unlucky guests. She and her husband, who are members of the museum, had arrived about two hours after the Giovanettis for their son's first birthday celebration. As the festivities wrapped up in the party room and guests prepared to explore the museum, Wagner took a load of stuff to the parking lot. That's when she discovered that her car -- and the cars of five of her guests -- had been ticketed. "I missed a big majority of my son's birthday party," she says of the time she spent trying, unsuccessfully, to sort things out.
The Children's Museum snafu is an odd byproduct of a new city policy supposedly created to protect taxpaying citizens like the Giovanettis and Wagners. After parking czar John Oglesby was accused of fixing five of his own parking tickets, as well as those of other people, Stephanie Foote, director of the Denver Department of Public Works, stripped the parking division of its ability to settle ticket disputes internally. The new policy, which took effect March 11, places that power solely with Denver County Court. (Although private citizens who disagree with their tickets have always been required to appear in court -- usually before a parking referee -- to contest them, the parking division previously had the discretion to dismiss tickets that had been issued by mistake, such as those given to city councilmembers conducting "official city business.")
Now the museum is paying the price. "The recipients of the tickets didn't understand why they were ticketed inadvertently, so they were mad at us," says museum spokeswoman Wendy Holmes. "It became our problem to solve."
Try as they might, though, museum officials couldn't solve the problem. For the last two months, they've made repeated calls in an effort to get someone, anyone, to drop the erroneous tickets. In a letter to several of the ticketed visitors, the museum explained that it has "spent a great deal of time and effort contacting a number of people at the City and County of Denver. This includes Parking Enforcement, Parking Management, the Parking Referee, the City Works Department, and the Court. At this time, the situation has not been resolved."
The museum lot is adjacent to a city-owned lot, where people must pay to park. When the free museum spaces fill up, guests sometimes have to park in the city's lot, where they'll be ticketed if they don't ante up. And at first, that's what public-works spokeswoman Patty Weiss insisted had happened on April 6.
"There was a birthday party, or many birthday parties, that day, and many parents who came with their kids went into the museum's lot and it was full, so they parked in the city's lot, which they thought was free," Weiss initially told Westword.
But Holmes insists that none of the ticketed cars were in the city lot, and in an April 12 letter to the Children's Museum, Anderson Moore, assistant director of parking management, admitted that the tickets had been issued by mistake. "We regret that citations were inadvertently issued to vehicles that were parked in the museum's lot," he wrote. "Now that we have defined the boundaries of each lot, this situation should not reoccur."
After seeing the letter, Weiss changed her department's story. "It seems there may have been tickets written in their lot," she now says. "There may have been some confusion because of the signage."
But even so, given the new policy, the situation is still out of her department's control. "Once tickets enter the system," Weiss explains, "they're under the purview of Denver County Court, but we're working on resolving the situation with the court, and we're hoping to get it resolved as soon as possible."
It can't be resolved too soon for Wagner. "There should be someone high up in parking management who can tell someone to delete those tickets, but apparently they can't do that anymore," she says. "Every policy needs to allow some wiggle room, because not every situation is the same." When Wagner appeared before the court's parking referee, he wouldn't budge -- not even after she provided him with a copy of Moore's letter. Eventually, the referee just knocked $5 off the $20 ticket. Wagner paid it, as did some of her guests, but other museum visitors are holding firm.
The parking division has been plagued by problems over the last several months. In addition to the ticket-fixing allegations, Oglesby caught flak for his ambitious revenue-generating plan that included extending parking-meter hours from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. citywide; he made headlines after threatening his management staff with disciplinary action for leaking information about the division to the mayor's office; he was criticized yet again for introducing a quota system for the number of parking tickets an employee should write. Then, still more damning information on Oglesby surfaced: He'd worked on the side for a California parking-payment-machine manufacturer that was bidding for a city contract.
The controversy prompted Foote to call for an audit of the entire division, which is currently under way. Although Oglesby's plan to enforce meters from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. never materialized, the city did decide last week to increase downtown meter rates from $1 an hour to $1.50 an hour.
City councilwoman Debbie Ortega, whose district includes the Central Platte Valley, where the Children's Museum is located, says the April 6 situation revealed an unintended consequence of Foote's new parking policy. "It's a really unfortunate situation that has occurred, and it has created some major inconveniences for people, but hopefully this experience will allow the city the opportunity to look at rectifying this so it doesn't happen somewhere else," Ortega says. "I don't know whether Stephanie [Foote] intends to amend the policy in these kinds of extenuating circumstances, but I think it needs some further discussion." (Foote was out of town and could not be reached for comment.)
For the Giovanettis, at least, the story has an almost-happy ending. Although the parking referee refused to accept Moore's letter as a reason to dismiss their ticket, she did drop it because of a technicality. "There was no meter number on it," Brian Giovanetti says.
