When I was editor of The Columbian and Tim Leavitt was Vancouver’s mayor, we had coffee quite a bit. We’d talk about national politics, his rarely cooking dinner and all other things local. And on more than one occasion — for reasons I can’t recall — we’d also talk about parking.
When the parking topic came up, the mayor would remind me he was not immune from (dramatic pause required here) the parking ticket.
“I get a lot of them,” he told me.
“I’d estimate 75 percent of those tickets were incurred while doing business on behalf of the citizens of Vancouver!”
My skepticism of all things political allowed me only to meekly shake my head in agreement. But come on, I was thinking, was he just blowing smoke?
So when I decided to write about parking in my Press Talk column Saturday, my mind kept drifting back to the mayor’s comment. So I asked the city to get me Leavitt’s parking ticket history. And mine as well.
I really couldn’t find a spot to fit the answers into my column but I had the info and, hey, I found it marginally more interesting then a cat video. So here it is:
Chad Eiken, the city’s director of community and economic development, produced the numbers for me. Let’s start with our former mayor:
“A total of 63 infractions,” Eiken reported, adding that the records looked like three of those were warnings.
“That makes a total of 60 citations with fines as far as I can tell.”
I was a choirboy compared to that. Just six parking tickets.
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