Wise council

I had a thought today when parking in town. Scary, huh. I thought about the new Pay and Display parking chit dispensers dotted strategically all over out city that replace the old one per space parking meters and how the City Council might be double dipping on parking fees.

Yes, really!

Back in the day when each parking space had its own meter, if there was time left on the clock, you parked there free as a bonus if the previous tenant over estimated how long they were going to be occupying the space. If you wanted more time than was on the meter, what ever amount of change you inserted incremented the time. In other words, each meter had a maximum daily value it could generate fees for.

Now, with the new Pay and Display jobbies, you put in the required amount of money for the time you think you'll be, grasp the little chit spewed out for you and put it on your dashboard for the resident Parking Nazi to see when they walk past with their wee book of blank parking tickets and chalk and off you go. If you have overestimated and over paid, the next person doesn't get to piggyback on the time paid for because the chits are space non-specific; the next person pays all over again for the time already paid and accounted for. Each chit has the area (eg 1st Ave East) and cost per hour printed on it (it varies from $1.20 - $2.00), so you can't even take it and go park somewhere else to use up the time you already paid for.

Not only did they put up our property rates (again), renege on their promised costs and fees for water rates, do a pathetic half-arsed job of maintaining street lighting and road surfaces, now they are screwing over the ratepayers in other insidious ways as well.

How unusual!

Way to go, Tauranga District Council, you bunch of thieving lowlife bottom feeders. Dogs everywhere have bursting bladders and there is nowhere left to tie a horse. Maybe this guy in Napier had the right idea after all, even if he didn't know it at the time.

Outside the courtroom, Malot insisted to reporters that he had only urinated once on the parking meter, despite a council spokesman saying earlier this month that it had been doused four or five times in the past year.

He said he had been out with friends and wanted to urinate. When they wouldn't let him urinate against their car, he chose the parking machine instead.

"I was not aware of what I was doing," he said.

Malot said today he had not been deliberately aiming at the machine but "couldn't stand properly".

Police dubbed him The Piddler on the Roof because of the second-floor location of the meter and in a statement said: "He pees up in the air in a big arc, so it goes in the coin slot and out the hole where people collect their tickets".

Well, someone had to do it, eh.