Lawyer defends charges over parking infringements

When Tony Stallard drove to town, parked in the public carpark and found the parking meter not working he took a punt and didn’t pay.

He got pinged by the parking warden - twice - last year and has ended up in court.

Stallard defended two charges against him in the Nelson District Court on Friday for failing to display a parking permit, and failing to pay a fee using the prescribed method, after he parked his vehicle in Nelson’s Buxton Square carpark, and found the meter closest to where he had parked was not operating.

The council confirmed at the hearing before a Justice of the Peace that the meter wasn’t working, but said it was normal procedure to find one that was.

The central city car park has a three-hour time limit and parking costs $2 an hour.

It’s free to park for the first hour but a car’s registration number still has to be entered into the pay-by-plate system.

On each occasion in September and October last year that Stallard was issued the $40 infringement fee for failing to display a parking permit, he had been parked near his office for about half an hour.

Stallard, the former director of Nelson firm Stallard Law and who now works as a consultant, represented himself in court as a “pensioner” when asked by JP David Whyte if he had a legal background.

His defence focused on challenging the Nelson City Council parking bylaw, and finer legal points around how evidence was presented in court, including that there was no evidence from the company contracted to provide and operate the machines that used the electronic, paperless system.

Stallard told Open Justice outside court that he had no issue with paying for parking or paying a fine imposed legitimately, but it was “the arrogance of the approach” that concerned him.

“I was apparently being difficult when I said everything was an issue, and obstructive to want to defend something when their machine was not working.”

Stallard veered down the line of seeking proof that the infringements had been issued for parking in Buxton Square, to which city council environmental officer Brian Wood responded that to do that, the hearing “would take a week”.

“We would then have to prove the wardens are who they are, and that would mean we’d have to call their mothers to prove they gave birth to them,” Wood said.

He said they had evidence of the date, place and by whom the notices were issued, how they were served and the owner of the vehicle who had “offended against the bylaw”.

Wood said it was a simple matter of the defendant having parked his vehicle and then refused to pay.

“In my view, the issues outside this are not relevant and should not be allowed to be introduced.”

Stallard said there was a “huge gap” in terms of what the council was trying to prove and how it would do that.

He then challenged the two parking wardens who had issued the infringement notices as to whether they were properly warranted, in terms of being able to enforce the council’s parking bylaw legally.

The wardens gave evidence under cross-examination, including that the distance to the next closest meter from where Stallard had parked was about 50 metres, and that there were five machines within the carpark.

He asked that if a machine wasn’t working, was it then council policy to require someone to “wander off and find an alternative”, to which the warden said it was.

Stallard challenged them on how the meters were monitored, and how the system detected any faults, to which one of the wardens responded that was “above his pay grade” but if a meter was down, the third party contracted to provide them was contacted directly.

In final submissions, Stallard argued with Whyte that no evidence had been presented to support the accuracy of how the (parking) system operated.

He said the prosecutor could have produced information from the third party contracted to provide the system, but it was “not for me or the court to fill the gaps”.

Whyte said a decision on whether the charges could be proved was going to take time and adjourned the matter until the end of May.