Atlanta homeowner fights what he calls a 'bogus' parking ticket
Homeowner fighting to dismiss parking tickets he says are invalid
It's a headache many in the city of Atlanta deal with parking tickets, but one man say he was hit with a bogus ticket for parking right in front of his Ansley Park Home. The homeowner says a permit is not needed to park there but that didn't stop ATLPlus from slapping him and his guest with a fine.
ATLANTA - A homeowner says he and his guest recently got hit with bogus parking tickets. Hans Klein says you don’t need a permit to park in front of his home in Ansley Park. But he says ATL Plus hit him and his contractor with fines of $75 each.
Klein thought it was okay to park right in front of his home. So, back in October he told his contractor he could park there. "It’s a non-permitted space," Klein said. "A lot of the neighborhood require parking permits but my house and my immediate neighbors don’t require a parking permit."
There are signs down the street indicating you need a permit to park. There are signs across the street telling you no parking without a permit.
But in front of Klein’s house "I have a parking place in front of my house," Klein said.
Still ATL Plus slapped Klein’s contractor with a fine. "He gets a ticket for parking without a permit in a zone that requires permit," Klein said.
A couple of weeks later, ticket officers issued another citation. "Came out to my car one day and there’s a ticket," Klein said, a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech.
The address on the ticket, however, placed his car a couple of blocks away. "It had an address down the street," Klein said, insisting he was parked in front of his own home.
ATL Plus, which administers tickets for the city of Atlanta, fell under scrutiny in 2020 after a judge warned the parking-enforcement contractor for repeatedly mailing invalid collection letters people whose tickets had been dismissed.
Klein says the courts eventually dismissed his contractor’s ticket. He is waiting for the verdict on his own citation. "When it happens once it’s a mistake. When it happens twice in succession you begin to wonder what’s going on."
FOX 5 called and emailed ATL Plus’s parent company SP Plus on Monday, a holiday. This story will be updated if there is a response.