Revelations today that Wellington parking wardens are on a daily quote system of 100 tickets per day!

The article that prompted this story was printed in todays Dominion (23 January). The story has been strongly defended by Wellington City Council who flatly deny any quota exists. See the comments below or here is a a transcript of what they added as comments on the site;

Just a friendly note, from Wellington City Council, that the story in the Dominion Post today is just a pile of nonsense. It is a total beat-up. As we told the reporter earlier this week, it is almost impossible for any warden to issue 100 tickets a day. We do not set ‘quotas’ for tickets – but on the other hand we expect our wardens to come to work and do a decent job – because we know that there are huge numbers of parking offences in the city every day. The story is based on the claims of a warden who clearly quit because he didn’t like the job he seems to have naively taken.
cheers
Richard MacLean – Wellington City Council Communications

Goes to show that there are two sides to every story and we are always happy to deliver both of these. You can now draw your own conclusions!

There have been many complaints about aggressive ticketing on the Shore by North Shore City Council and particularly in and around Devonport where Parking Wardens are constantly in search of cars parking over the prescribed time limit.

Wellington City Council have now revealed this to be a lucrative means of fund raising having achieved over $9.9m in fines in the year ended June 2009.

Councils have a hard job of the balance between managing scarce parking resources and not allowing abuse of the system and also the constant demands of fiscal opportunities.

Quota’s however have a feel of changing the mix from managing resources to revenue collection. Morale of this story seems to be, that you should be alert and not give them a chance to make you one of their daily quote!