How many parking tickets are one too many?

Twenty, 50, 100? Try 600.

That’s the number of tickets — possibly even more —one Markham couple has accumulated over the past six years, totalling, they say, about $25,000.

“It’s at least a hundred tickets every year,” said Jeffrey Burke, adding most tickets are from “parking in our own driveway. My wife and I feel we are being targeted.” He got two tickets in one day some weeks ago, he said.

Markham officials, however, tell a different story.

Bill Wiles, the town’s bylaw manager, says the couple’s cars have been ticketed for blocking the sidewalk, for encroaching on the street, for parking overnight on the street when it’s not allowed.

“We’ve cautioned them but … I’ve never seen a case like this,” he said.

Burke, 31, his wife Pamela Defino, 30, and their toddler daughter, Vasilika, live in a detached home on Saffron St. in north Markham. Their one-car garage home has a small driveway, split by the sidewalk.

Burke says he can park his truck, a GMC Sierra, between the garage door and the sidewalk but there’s no place for his wife’s car, a BMW SUV. The garage is full of construction equipment, he said, and the SUV would be difficult to park inside it regardless.

That leaves them with no choice but to park the SUV in the space between the sidewalk and road, he said. “The tires are still on the driveway…maybe the bumper sticks out a bit on the street.” But it doesn’t interfere with traffic, he added.

“We don’t want tickets, any tickets … that too for parking in our own driveway but we don’t know what to do,” said Burke, who is in the construction business.

The 600-plus tickets have been written up for eight cars and nine licence plates over the years. The couple says they have explored every alternative, including buying a smaller car. The fines keep coming, Burke said.

There is no overnight street parking allowed in their neighbourhood.

“My wife was in an accident and has still not gone back to work because of it, so we can’t look for relocated parking too,” Burke said. He says he has paid off as much as $23,000 in fines.

Wiles said there are outstanding fines of about $12,000, so far as he knows.

“About 40 per cent are because of the cost that incurred when they didn’t pay or dispute and were convicted in absentia,” he said. That added another $16.50 to a $35 or $40 ticket.

Wiles said he hasn’t been to the home but has seen photos taken by officers issuing tickets where the vehicle was clearly obstructing the road, he said. A number of tickets were issued to a pickup truck that was sticking out well into the road, he said.

The bylaw requires residents not to park in such a way as to obstruct the sidewalk or the road, he said. If the car’s tires are on the sidewalk or the road, there is a good chance of a fine, he said.

“You know, it’s the neighbours who have called up a lot of times to complain,” Wiles said.

For Burke’s neighbours on Saffron St., the news of the accumulated fines came as no surprise.

“They always got the tickets. We see them every morning,” Carmela Viggiani told yorkregion.com.

Viggiani, who lives across the street, says the pickup truck was parked between the sidewalk and the road for a few years. The couple has changed that practice now, she said.

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Viggiani says she never complained about the parking issue but can’t understand why her neighbours kept doing it.

“If I got two or three tickets, I would never do that again,” said another neighbour, who didn’t want his name in the paper.

“They had to be fined,” he said. “But they kept parking that way. They should have been tackled a long time ago.”

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