Lower Merion officials say vendor error led to confusion over parking zone restrictions in Haverford
LOWER MERION – Lower Merion Township officials blame a recent ordinance mix-up on a vendor’s mistake that occurred over a decade ago.
Two weeks ago, during a police committee meeting, the commissioners considered creating a new parking ordinance along one section of Old Lancaster Road in Haverford. The new ordinance would have created a two-hour parking zone on a street that the township had been enforcing as a two-hour parking zone for over a decade.
The new parking regulation would have established a two-hour zone from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., except Saturday and Sunday on the north side of Old Lancaster Road between a point 70 feet east of North Buck Lane and Barrett Avenue.
So why create an ordinance if they were already enforcing the restriction?
When the township staff needed to put up new parking zone signs, they checked their online codes and couldn’t find any time the commissioners approved it.
If true, the township was enforcing a parking restriction with no basis in township regulations.
So the township staff recommended that the board quickly pass the ordinance so they could put up the new signs.
But that brought up a new issue.
When the parking zone proposal was raised during a police committee meeting, Commissioner Josh Grimes and Gerald Adams, director of parking services for Lower Merion, disagreed over whether anyone who had been ticketed should be refunded.
Grimes believed that if the township never passed such an ordinance, anyone ticketed should be refunded. Adams described any lack of an ordinance as an oversight.
But now the debate, in this case, is a moot point.
During the commissioner’s meeting this week, when the board was scheduled to vote on the parking restriction, Todd Sinai, president of the board of commissioners, recommended the issue be tabled.
But why?
“We discovered, or staff discovered, that this actually was a regulation put into effect in 2007,” Sinai said.
According to Sinai, the vendor that takes new ordinances and puts them into Lower Merion’s online code failed to include Old Lancaster Road.
“So we passed it. It’s in the records. It never showed up in the code. We do not need to pass it again,” Sinai said.
So for anyone who got a ticket in that restricted parking zone and thought they might be getting a refund – it won’t happen since the board had passed the ordinance.
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