City to ticket and tow vehicles if necessary during street sweeping Apr 4, 2017 12:44 PM

LETHBRIDGE – Street sweeping will begin in Lethbridge next week (Apr. 10), and this year anyone parked in a zone marked by temporary NO PARKING signs can expect a $30 ticket and the possibility of being towed at their expense.

It comes after the City of Lethbridge launched a courtesy-tow pilot-project last year, in which they moved vehicles at no cost to the owner. Prior to the initiative, street sweepers often had to go around parked vehicles, meaning they weren’t fully cleaning city streets.

As Transportation Operations Manager Lee Perkins noted however, the pilot-project was short lived.

“It was a success in the fact that we actually cleaned curb-to-curb in one quadrant of the city, so in terms of environmental friendliness it was definitely a success, but it was a costly venture, it was in the neighbourhood of $20,000 to move cars last year,” explained Perkins. “Our hope was that by doing this residents would see the effort that we were putting into it and would help us a little bit, but as it went on it became very arduous and very difficult to maintain the schedule for the street sweepers, so we had to discontinue.”