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More city employees now enjoying parking perks

Councilors’ ability to get tickets waived now given to 175 employees

Tags allow city councilors to park without being ticketed.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

Few aggravations bedevil Bostonians more than parking. But the pain is not always shared by city councilors, who have long enjoyed the privilege of getting tickets dismissed in the name of official municipal business.

Councilor Josh Zakim has taken advantage of the perk: He has had 14 tickets tossed since his first term began, in January 2014. Half of Zakim’s dismissed tickets were issued a few steps from his Back Bay condominium, often just after 8 a.m., when parking meters go into effect. Zakim said he was working.

Councilor Tito Jackson had nine tickets erased in 2014. The tally included five violations written after dark for parking illegally near Copley Square, where Jackson has used the Charlesmark Hotel bar for events, meetings, and to socialize, staff said.

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Now, the parking privilege is being expanded beyond city councilors. The administration of Mayor Martin J. Walsh issued at the beginning of the year about 175 white parking placards that dangle from rearview mirrors and let councilors, their staff, and other city officials park — for free — where the average resident is forbidden, or must pay.

Park in a loading zone or no parking zone for an hour? No problem. Two hours at a meter? No charge. And resident parking restrictions are meaningless for holders of the placards.

“Maybe call it a job perk. Would you turn down a job perk? Do you have any job perks?” said Councilor Frank Baker, who used his position to void a violation issued when he had forgotten to affix his resident parking sticker. “I had one ticket done because I was well within my right to do it. . . . I don’t abuse that program.”

Under the state public records law, the Globe requested parking ticket information for the past five years for the current City Council. The data showed that councilors’ tickets were dismissed at a rate three times greater than the general public.

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Why should city officials have parking privileges not enjoyed by their constituents, who often have to find parking in neighborhoods where they might not have a parking sticker? The idea is to make it easier for Boston officials to do their jobs.

Written guidelines say the parking passes are supposed to be used only for “official city business,” which means “when an employee is carrying out the official duties of his or her employment and is not engaging in personal business.”

But sometimes, defining city business can be tricky. Attending a community meeting? That seems clear. But what about parking to pick up lunch in the North End during a workday? Or responding to constituent e-mail at home while your car is parked at an expired meter? That’s not so clear.

Councilors and others with the parking perk still must abide by rules against parking on a sidewalk, blocking a hydrant, or using a handicapped spot.

The transportation department launched the placard initiative because the mayor is pushing community engagement, said Gina Fiandaca, the city’s transportation commissioner, and that means more city employees using their personal cars in neighborhoods. (Not including police and fire, the city owns roughly 1,100 vehicles with official “City of Bo ston” markings — including 80 that are taken home by employees — that enjoy the same parking privileges.)

To get a violation dismissed under the new placard system, city officials must file a written affidavit within two weeks attesting they were on city business. If the parking privilege is abused, city employees can be held accountable by their department head, Fiandaca said. But city councilors do not have supervisors, and Fiandaca said transportation officials are not proactively checking for misuse.

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“We ask them to sign under the pains and penalties of perjury, so we accept that they will be honest,” Fiandaca said. “They are attesting to us they are in fact on city business.”

The Globe reviewed dismissed parking tickets and cross-referenced dates and times with councilors’ private schedules obtained under the open records law. After the Globe asked Zakim about his dismissed tickets, he said he could prove he was working even when nothing was on his schedule.

Since taking office, Zakim has been ticketed 21 times, with 14 of those violations dismissed. He tried unsuccessfully to have three others dismissed, according to city records, although his staff disputed that.

“I absolutely only use this for city business,” Zakim said. “The ones that you pointed out, I can tell you with absolute confidence that all the ones in 2015, I was on city business.”

One morning when Zakim did not feed a meter, he said he was having breakfast with a local business owner. Another morning, he said he was home answering constituent questions, and his staff provided a time-stamped e-mail to back him up.

Zakim said he did not have records from 2014, so he said he planned to pay $90 to cover the fines for three meter violations that were dismissed.

“I don’t believe anything was done improperly,” Zakim said. “But unlike the most recent ones, I don’t have specific items to point to” that could prove city work was being done.

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On the council, Jackson topped the parking violation list: He has been ticketed 87 times and incurred late fees 78 times in the last five years. Jackson’s nine dismissals in 2014 represent 10 percent of his total tickets. One ticket Jackson had dismissed was for parking in front of the Charlesmark Hotel.

“I keep a very busy schedule,” said Jackson, who declined to discuss individual tickets. “I get parking tickets. I pay them. In a pretty small number of cases, I’ve used the program to get them excused.”

The new placards may make detecting abuse harder. The license plates of placard holders have been loaded into handheld devices used by parking enforcement officers. So even if officers do not notice a pass dangling from a mirror and start to write a ticket, those handheld devices should alert them that a vehicle has privileges.

That means it’s much less likely tickets will be written. And that means there will be no easy way to check if a councilor or other official is abusing the privilege.

In 2007, former city councilor Michael P. Ross was fined $2,000 by the State Ethics Commission after investigators determined he was not on city business for 35 of the 105 tickets dismissed over four years.

Records reviewed by the Globe show that out of 266 parking violations, city councilors have had 42 tickets thrown out, the overwhelming majority of which were dismissed under the special program. After Ross was fined, many councilors stopped using the perk, although there has been an uptick in ticket dismissals in recent years.

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Under the old system, city councilors had a laminated card for their dashboard, which sometimes prevented tickets. Five councilors did not have any tickets dismissed under the program: Mark Ciommo, Michael F. Flaherty Jr., Matt O’Malley, Ayanna Pressley, and Michelle Wu, records show.

City Councilor Stephen J. Murphy has had four tickets fixed, saving him $144, records show. The transportation department rejected Murphy’s request to dismiss two other tickets — one that was issued for an expired inspection sticker, the other for parking in a street cleaning zone.

City Council President Bill Linehan had three meter violations dismissed last month, all of which, he said, were issued in the course of official business. Councilors Salvatore LaMattina and Timothy McCarthy each had one ticket dismissed, records show. City Councilor Charles C. Yancey had two parking violations dismissed, and three of his tickets have gone unpaid since as long ago as 2010.


Andrew Ryan can be reached at andrew.ryan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeAndrewRyan.