Parking Ticket
Yea. My very first citation on the road. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be a fan of Moorhead, Minnesota. This morning, this piece of paper was greeting me under my wipers when I moved my car. Moorhead is a very wannabe-preppy kind of place. Every Tuesday morning in the neighborhood my brother lives in, a street sweeper comes through. This means all the cars on the road need to be elsewhere. So last night I moved my car to the adjacent street. Everything cool? Not quite.
You can't quite see it on the ticket because of some carbon smudging, but the actual violation is code 5.2.3A WRONG SIDE OF STREET. I looked it up and it seems that, here in the great honorable hamlet of Moorhead, parking facing the opposite direction of traffic on any side of a two-way street is a ticket-able offense. Yea, I admit, I was parked facing oncoming traffic, but can this really be a big enough deal to pass a law and start charging people? How many people were dying that this needed to be a law?
To make things worse, Ryan went out this morning to bring the garbage can back in and, get this, there was a $15 ticket on that as well. It seems that there's a fine here where if you have any garbage in bags on the side of the can or if the can is overflowing and doesn't close all the way when full, that's a $15 fine.
Being the angry tourist that I am, I began doing research on both tickets and discovered some other horrifying Moorhead laws. Get this: It is illegal to, within the city limits, park on grass or unpaved parcels of land EVEN IF YOU OWN THE LAND. So if you have a thin driveway and several cars, you'd better find space on the road because the fuds will nab you if you (Heaven forbid) use your lawn or the side of your yard to park a car. Also, here in the city, it is illegal to park on any road within 5 feet of either side of all driveways. This one isn't very enforced, but if it were, there'd be thousands of unhappy Minnesotans. I've come the the conclusion that these rules are here because the powers that be want Moorhead to be absolutely beautiful to the point of telling people what they can and can't do with their own property. Why else do they clean the roads every week? Why else keep people from parking on their lawns? Why else charge tourists for parking against the grain? It's petty and frivolous, if you ask me.
But. The address on my ticket (Which I've blurred out to protect the innocent) is an invalid address. There is no such address anywhere in Moorhead. The cop who wrote it messed up and put a house number from one street together with the street name of another different street. Ryan and I drove down to cop-land to protest our tickets. Ryan got static from the garbage people but the girl I dealt with to seemed to have never met an Oregonian before and was quite thrilled to have had the chance to protect the outside image of the city. I told her my story, how I believed that since the address was illegitimate, the ticket had no enforceable jurisdiction (How can you ticket a car for being in a location that doesn't exist?) and she agreed. It'll goto a panel for review and if I don't hear back from them in two weeks, the ticket is void. I'm pretty confident.
Shocked, but confident. PS - New GIR icon!! I made it!! My first animated GIF. I should do more of them!