By Jay Landers 

A CBS Colorado story last month about alleged wrongful parking citations in Castle Rock, Colorado, offers a familiar example of how the parking industry tends to fare in local media coverage. Featuring an angry restaurant owner and an aggrieved customer, the May 14 report left out documentation that the parking compliance company, Parking Revenue Recovery Services (PRRS), says it provided to the reporter before the story aired, documentation showing that the customer had triggered the citation himself by entering an incorrect license plate number during the parking validation process.

What was reported 

For the May 14 story, CBS reporter Olivia Young interviewed Tom Wurtz, the owner of Castleview Café, which is in a Castle Rock development known as The Silo. The Silo’s parking lot includes signage directing drivers to pay for parking or obtain validation from a participating vendor using the provided QR code. 

Wurtz claimed that his customers routinely receive wrongful citations from PRRS, which handles compliance for Foresight Parking, the company that manages parking at the site. According to Young, Wurtz said that he hears from roughly four customers per day who are angry about having received unwarranted citations from PRRS, a figure that PRRS has disputed. Wurtz also said that regular customers now avoid parking in the lot because of the perceived difficulty of completing the validation process properly.

Also interviewed for the story was Matt Rogers, a customer of the cafe who said he received a $104 citation from PRRS after parking in The Silo’s lot in April, despite having completed the validation process. Rogers complained about the citation online and received “dozens of replies” from others claiming to have had similar experiences, Young said. 

PRRS’s response 

For her story, Young reached out to PRRS for comment. John Conway, a co-founder and executive vice president of PRRS, explained that Rogers “entered an incorrect license plate number into the validation system, which resulted in the notice being issued,” according to a May 12 email to Young that PRRS provided to Parking Today. “Once the matter was appealed and reviewed, the notice was dismissed,” Conway said. 

Conway acknowledged that a minor error on the company’s part might have caused the dismissal to take longer than necessary. “Unfortunately, during the dismissal process, a customer service representative selected the incorrect disposition option in the system, which may have triggered an additional follow-up letter before the dismissal was fully reflected,” he said in the email. “However, to be clear, the notice itself was dismissed, and no further action is being taken.  

“Based on our review, the system functioned as designed, as the original issue stemmed from the incorrect plate information entered during validation rather than a system malfunction.” 

In her story that aired May 14, Young referenced statistics provided by PRRS indicating that 92% of parkers at The Silo have navigated the payment or validation processes successfully. Of the more than 1,000 notices that PRRS has issued, 446 resulted from user error and were dismissed. 

What was left out of the story 

Conway’s explanation of events regarding what happened with the citation sent to Rogers was included in the written summary of the story that appears on the CBS website. However, it was not mentioned in the original televised version of the story, potentially leading viewers to conclude that PRRS had improperly issued the citation to Rogers. 

Not included in either the video or written versions of the story were two exculpatory screenshots from PRRS’s database that the company provided to CBS before they ran the story, said Todd Tucker, the chief operations officer and chief legal officer for PRRS. One of the screenshots includes the payment transaction record showing the incorrect license plate details that Rogers entered during the validation process (see Figure 1), while the other shows the license plate recognition (LPR) data screen showing no matching plate found (see Figure 2). 

Instead, the written summary of the story includes the following denial by Rogers that he entered his details incorrectly: “‘I kind of question the fact that they have the license plate in there wrong, or I entered it in wrong. I think that’s a pretty lame excuse,’ Rogers said.” 

However, PRRS told Young that Rogers “acknowledged typing the wrong license plate during his call with the customer service rep,” according to a follow-up email sent by the company to Young on May 13. “In fact, the exchange was recorded and is part of the transaction record. Nonetheless, the fee was waived because we understand that people make mistakes,” PRRS said in the email. 

For this story, Parking Today emailed Young seeking an explanation as to why the video version of her story did not mention that Rogers had entered his license plate details incorrectly. Parking Today also inquired as to why CBS did not refer to the screenshots provided by PRRS, which showed that the license plate Rogers entered during the validation process did not match the plate captured by the lot’s LPR system.  

A producer for CBS Colorado replied to one of the inquiries, indicating that the network hoped to respond in a timely manner. Ultimately, however, neither Young nor anyone else from CBS responded to Parking Today’s requests for comment.  

JAY LANDERS is the editor-in-chief of Parking Today. He can be reached at [email protected].