Ukrainian Village Residents Claim City Wrongly Issued Tickets

CHICAGO (CBS)--People living on a Ukrainian Village street say the city erroneously gave them parking tickets Thursday, and this is the second time it's happened on their block in the past two weeks.

The signs on the 2300 block of West Ohio Street warn drivers of a permit parking-only zone, as of April 29.

But Andrea Crudder said, just last week, the staff at Alderman Roberto Maldonado's office told her she didn't have to worry about the new parking plan--signs or no signs--thanks to a neighborhood petition.

"Because they received enough signatures, over 50 percent (of residents on the block), to warrant the sign being taken down," Crudder said.

Imagine Crudder's surprise when, on Thursday, just days after that phone call, she found parking tickets on her car, her husband's car, and more than a dozen other cars on the block.

Nick Beren, one of Crudder's neighbors, said he took his ticket into Alderman Maldonado's office and showed the staff.

"She says, 'you weren't supposed to get no tickets,'" Beren said. "We don't know the reason why they did it again."

Back on April 18, before the residents submitted their petition, an officer accidentally ticketed cars on that same block more than a week before the new rule was even supposed to go into effect on the 29th.

Chicago police said drivers could reach out to the 12th District to get those tickets voided, but Thursday's tickets came from the City of Chicago Department of Finance--not CPD.

"Somebody made a mistake," Beren said. "They (the alderman's office) took the ticket and said the alderman's office is going to take care of it for us."

In an email to CBS 2, the city's finance department said they were looking into what happened.

Crudder said the alderman's office also told her yesterday to bring in her tickets and a staff member would work on it.

"It's extremely frustrating," she said. "Once again, taking people's time to have to fight this ticket and go through the bureaucracy of getting the ticket removed."

"I guess they are trying to do their job," Beren said. "But they don't know what job they're suppposed to be doing."

A staff member at Alderman Maldonado's office told CBS 2 that people will not have to pay the tickets from Thursday if they bring them in to the office. She said the alderman and his staff are working to get the permit parking signs removed as soon as possible.