12,000 owed parking ticket refunds

Recipients of more than 12,000 Invercargill parking tickets are entitled to refunds.

It is potentially a $490,000 exercise for the Invercargill City Council, which has acknowledged the need for refunds following a successful legal challenge from Melvin Butler to his $40 ticket.

The ticket was issued in December for failing to activate an inner-city parking meter, which the council required to access 30 minutes of free parking. Justices of the peace Sharron Ryan and Craig Rodgers ruled in the Invercargill District Court in February that Butler was correct to argue the council was not empowered, by the wording of its own parking bylaw, to require the meters to be activated.

The council then withdrew a similar ticket issued to another court-bound complainant Paul Hutchinson, and other tickets issued but not by that stage paid.

On Tuesday, the council announced at an infrastructure committee meeting that it would also recompense people who had paid their fines.

The scale of the exercise emerged on Thursday, when consenting and environment manager Jonathan Shaw confirmed that 12,272 tickets had been issued for failing to activate a meter.

This reached back to December 2021, when the kiosk system was introduced.

Refunds would be provided from funds rthat had previously been collected from the incorrectly issued fines. “We have already started the process of identifying those impacted and will continue to work with the community as we move through this process,’’ Shaw said.

A refund request form would be available on the council’s website from next week, for people who believed they were entitled to a refund.

The council has also approved a draft for changes to the parking control bylaw to go out for public consultation between May 29 and June 28, with hearings and deliberations set to take place on July 9.

Both Butler and Hutchinson have welcomed the corrections but lamented the need for them, each citing contact from many people who they said had previously contacted the council, raising issues about parking rules they had been unable to follow.

The lack of clarity on the kiosks’ wording – which the council had corrected following Butler and Hutchinson’s initial approaches, but without revoking any issued tickets – had been the initial complaint.

It was after this that Butler’s lawyer Kristy Rusher had investigated the separate issue of the bylaw wording not authorising the council’s practices.

The council’s finance chairman, Grant Dermody, asked at the Tuesday infrastructure committee meeting whether the council had yet learnt all it should from the “massive error’’. Asked afterwards whether he felt he had received a response, he said the council needed to be “a learning organisation’’.

He didn’t believe people expected the council to make no mistakes, but they did expect it would learn from them and move forward knowing how not to repeat them.

As things stood, he was “not confident’’ the council had yet done that.

It had been a massive mistake, he said, and the costs extended beyond the amount of money that would need to be paid out, to include the requirement on staff time and resources.

And though the parking bylaw was essentially about compliance not revenue generation, it was also true that the money that was available to be paid back would have been put to other use, he said.