$120K ticket aide is NYC’s Dr. Do-Little
He’s getting $120,000 a year to fight fewer than two tickets a day.
The Department of Finance hired Parking Summons Advocate Jean Wesh for the six-figure salary in April and promised he’d help New Yorkers with their parking citations.
But while New Yorkers fight some 2.4 million tickets a year, Wesh has investigated just 274 in his eight months on the job — an average of 1.5 per day — getting 164 of them tossed, according to the Department of Finance.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson slammed the agency Wednesday after The Post revealed there was no way to contact the so-called advocate.
“If your job is to be an advocate to the public and to help them navigate city government . . . you need to be available, and clearly, this man is not doing the job,” Johnson told The Post.
“You need to go to work. You need to set up the hotline. You need to be available to the public.
“The person who needs to be accountable for this is the finance commissioner [Jacques Jiha]. He’s in charge of the agency.”
Comptroller Scott Stringer said the job “doesn’t even seem real” and called for an immediate investigation.
“New Yorkers are footing the bill, while the Department of Finance has failed to create a public hotline for the parking advocate, inform 311 of the advocate’s existence and or even create a mention on the agency’s Web site,” Stringer said.
“The Department of Finance owes the public answers.”
A spokeswoman for the agency said its Web site and 311 would be updated “at the end of the year,” and claimed Wesh has been busy hiring staff and compiling information on how to avoid getting parking tickets.
But he has hired just three people — and two of them haven’t even started work yet, the agency confirmed.
One case manger started in November and another is set to begin work on Dec. 24 — just in time for a taxpayer-funded holiday the next day on Christmas. Another started in November. The third’s first day won’t be until Jan. 7.
Wesh’s office is also responsible for producing information about common parking mistakes, how to dispute or appeal tickets and the penalty schedule — all of which are readily available on the DOF Web site, where 50 percent of New Yorkers go to take care of parking tickets.
“Jean Wesh is singly staffing his office while resolving complicated parking cases. There is also a hiring and vetting process that has to be adhered to,” a Finance Department spokeswoman said in defending his record.