Editor,
Dear Tourists,
We ordinary citizens of Eureka apologize for the rude behavior concerning the parking meters and excessive ticketing. Unfortunately, it appears our city feels that this is a last resort to paying its bills.
However, there are more important issues for all of us to be aware of. The legalities of how this process of ticketing and fining goes on, is to be in question. When a person gets a ticket, a downtown parking meter it costs $10, which goes to the police station. If not received in amount of time given, the person gets a postcard (open faced) that says there will be a warrant for their arrest by a certain date. Now is that legal? Can you get arrested for a $10 fine for a non-moving violation?
I do believe police are necessary for public safety but they should absolutely be required to use legal methods only. They should be concerned with safety not how to get money to run the city.
I rarely shop in downtown stores because of all the trouble with meters and police. We are allowing bad behavior to misrepresent all the merchants’ hard work to invite tourists here for a good time. This needs to stop.
I witnessed an elderly lady and man pulled over, their vehicle searched – nothing was found and they went on their way. Is this what we want to happen to our customers? Or to us? Only we can make this change by disallowing our police to act this way.
The general rule is that private property cannot be used for police stakeouts or hideouts. These kinds of operations must be carried out on public property. The legal place for police to patrol is the street itself, public parking lots or state, county or city land, so yes, they can patrol at Leatherwood Park entrances, but not on privately owned parking lots or abandoned businesses. Only a few feet on either side of the highway is public, and that’s it So that translates into a lot of illegal practices. Wrestling money out of locals and tourists will definitely finish off this once and friendly town.
BJ Rock