Sweep snags scores of Fan parking violators

Towing information

For a schedule of street cleaning in Richmond, click here or call the city's Department of Public Works at (804) 646-6430. Next up is Highland Park, beginning Monday.

To determine if your vehicle has been towed in Richmond, call (804) 233-5757 for Seibert's Towing. All vehicles are towed to the Seibert's lot behind Southside Plaza.

It costs $60 to recover your vehicle, plus an additional $25 for every day beyond 24 hours that a vehicle remains impounded. Any parking violation and costs can be appealed in Richmond General District Court.

Vehicle owners can pay at the curb to avoid having a vehicle towed. Cost depends on when the vehicle is intercepted by the owner. If the car still is parked at curbside, the cost typically is $30; if the vehicle is fully aboard the tow truck, the cost may be $60.

No vehicle can be towed outside the presence of a law-enforcement officer.

It was just after 8 a.m. yesterday when Mike Esposito inhaled on a cigarette from a Marlboro hard pack and climbed into the cab of his Durham & Sons tow truck. He pulled away from the corner of Floyd Avenue and Morris Street in Richmond's Fan District and went to work a block away.

A Honda Accord was in violation of a sign that for a week had warned there was no parking after 8 a.m. Thursday.

Street cleaning.

"This is emotional devastation. It's people coming out of their homes and watching their car and dozens of others being hauled away on the backs of tow trucks," Fan resident George Wickham said.

"You can't help feeling sad for their misery. Wednesday, I bet I saw 20 trucks hauling away cars."

In a two-day street-cleaning operation Wednesday and yesterday that saw nearly 150 cars towed to Southside Plaza -- where storage runs $25 a day -- Fan residents yet again learned a simple lesson that seems to last only until just before the next street cleaning.

"You gotta read the signs," Sue Heady explained to her grandson, Benjamin Downey, 3, schooling the curly-haired youngster about one of life's eternal verities. A few feet away, a tow truck pulled away a Toyota Land Cruiser in front of Fox Elementary School on Hanover Avenue..

"I try to put on a friendly face," said Richmond police officer Patricia Meadows, part of this week's police/tow-truck blitzkrieg that just as readily yanked a Mercedes convertible from Monument Avenue as it did a beat-up pickup truck from Floyd Avenue.

. . .

The effort stretched from the Boulevard to Lombardy Avenue. Where bumper-to-bumper cars once tarried was left not so much scorched earth as a ribbon of streetside cleanliness that resembled a bathtub ring.

"You see everything," said Esposito, a 20-year veteran of the towing business. "You got people all the time running out, pulling up their pants, tightening their belts, trying to save the cars."

Esposito is sympathetic, but he lives by an iron rule: "I get a hook on the vehicle, it's all over."

The same goes for Meadows. Once she starts writing the ticket, you're going to get a ticket.

Fellow trucker Gerard Fox went only three blocks on Floyd Avenue before Esposito's comment took on a stunning reality.

Jason Storm, 39, oversleeping from a late night at Kings Dominion, awoke to the unmistakable sound of his Mazda Miata being hauled aboard Fox's truck.

Storm ran buck naked to the sidewalk, hoping to interrupt the operation. He stopped his car from being towed, went back inside to get some shorts, and returned with a credit card.

He salvaged the car, avoided a $60 charge and a trip to Southside Plaza, and managed to say: "This isn't anything too tough. I've lived in New York."

He said he isn't bothered by oversleeping or by the $30 parking violation he paid on the spot to keep his car from being towed. "My mother always said, 'Punctuality is a virtue of the bored.'"

Laughing, Fox said: "This will definitely rank No. 1 in terms of my street-cleaning experiences."

Nearby, Sherrena Greig snapped pictures with a cell phone of her about-to-be towed car and a nearby no-parking sign that she said had been in place -- and ignored -- for months.

And on Stuart Avenue, a cream-white Ford Edge was hauled off despite a sign in the window: "Please stop ticketing me. I have a decal."

Sorry. Wrong ordinance. The Fan's parking regulations and decal-bearing demands have nothing to do with street-cleaning rules regarding parking.

. . .

Back on Stuart Avenue, April Garnett delighted in the parade of towed cars.

"We have some obnoxious frat guys across the street," she said. "Oh, look. There goes a car with a Sigma Alpha Epsilon sticker."

Even the best of deeds goes punished when street-cleaning time comes.

Ingrid Lopes -- doctor's appointment pending, mother-in-law's plea to walk her dog hanging in the air -- pulled onto Hanover Avenue shortly before 10 right in front of a no-parking street-cleaning sign. She was in a hurry.

"It was get the English mastiff, walk a block to the park, let him pee, come back and they had me," she said. "I'm here to do a good deed, and I get caught."

Jerry Berry of J.L.B. Towing Inc. lowered Lopes' car back to the street, accepted $30 for the parking ticket, explained to Lopes she was getting a break because she didn't have to pay the full $60 and then go across the river to get her car.

Then he explained another one of those eternal verities, a different one from what little Benjamin Downey heard from his grandmother: "Don't nobody get paid unless we do something."

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.