Parking tickets given to those who attended a funeral in the west end will be cancelled by the City of Windsor.
Approximately 70 tickets were given to those who attended a funeral at Harvest Bible Church for a 22-year-old man on January 9.
Christopher Eelman, lead pastor at Harvest Bible Church, says nearly 900 people attended the funeral last Friday, but there are only 275 parking spaces at the church.
Those attending the funeral parked down the street at Benders Bar and Grill, and on the grass between the church and roadway.
He says as the service started, the city's parking enforcement showed up and started ticketing those primarily parked on the grass in front of the church.
Eelman called 311 immediately, who told him what the process was to disputing parking tickets. Eelman stated that they told those ticketed to not pay them yet as they worked to find a solution, and if it couldn't be resolved that the church would pay the tickets.
Eelman says approximately 70 tickets were handed out.
"There is a small grassy section by the Spring Garden Trail entrance that is often used for parking, I think just informally, but not conventional parking spaces but kind of in an extreme circumstance where I don't know what you're going to do... turn away mourners, and family, and friends for this pretty significant moment."
He says he spoke to parking enforcement as they were ticketing vehicles.
"They were kind of midway through, and they said 'you have to call 311, we can't really make any calls on our own', so we immediately called 311, called our councillor, and got put in a process to try to resolve it, but it was clear that wasn't going to be figured out by the end of the funeral."
He adds that the church was going to foot the bill.
"We had received some feedback early this week, I was chatting with one of our councillors via email... talking through how to dispute tickets, and I was like I don't want to add insult to injury to mourners by pointing them to a dispute process that may or may not be successful... we'd just rather pay the ticket then.")
Windsor mayor Drew Dilkens says all the tickets given will be removed.
"Giving tickets in this particular area is complaint based, so a resident called to complain which initiated our provider, the commissioners, to go out and start issuing the tickets. And once they start, they can't give some a ticket and not others a ticket. So, we've resolved it, all of those tickets will be expunged, and we feel bad for the loss of that gentleman's life."
He says this is very different from someone getting your average parking ticket.
"Every week there's someone complaining about having received a ticket, this is one of those exceptional cases which we see from time to time. And as a city we have to be compassionate, we have to be able to deal with these things in real time, and be able to manage a situation that may not fit perfectly, and squarely within the four corners of the law."
Dilkens says these occurrences are more rare than they are common.
"We can deal with these things as a city, and I'm sure as things come forward, if there are circumstances where people know they're likely to have a huge turnout, if you let us know in advance... and I know it's imperfect, you can't always guess, but if you let us know in advance, we would make sure that we didn't even issue the tickets."
Dilkens says the tickets that haven't been paid will be cancelled.
If someone has already paid the ticket, the city will issue a refund, and they can contact Parking Enforcement on McDougall Avenue.
-with files from AM800's The Kyle Horner Show