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A file photo of cars parked in the downtown area of Princeton

(Mark Sherman)

PRINCETON – A Princeton parking enforcement officer was suspended without pay for a month and reassigned after improperly dismissing a parking ticket, town administrator Bob Bruschi said today.

John Hughes is the second parking enforcement officer to be punished for not following the town's parking enforcement policy.

Parking enforcement officer Chris Boutote was fired on Monday for what town officials said was a selective enforcement of parking meters in Princeton's central business district in exchange for certain goods. Boutote, a former borough police officer, collected a $4,400 monthly pension and earned $48,109 a year.

Hughes and Boutote were first suspended last month after the local news website Planet Princeton reported officers were not ticketing vehicles that displayed menus, shopping bags or other items with local store logos on their dashboards.

Planet Princeton reported that over several weeks observers saw vehicles with local store identifications remain at metered parking on streets near the central business district for up to 10 hours at a time without being ticketed, while other vehicles would be ticketed promptly if meters expired.

Virtually all metered parking in that area is for two hours or less, according to a town parking operations map.

Hughes, who earns $44,000 a year, was reassigned to one of the municipality's parking garages as an attendant and any future disciplinary action would result in a termination, Bruschi said in an e-mail.

The internal investigation that led to Hughes’s suspension did not lead to any conduct of selective enforcement, but found he bypassed proper procedure to dismiss a ticket originally issued by Boutote, Bruschi said.

"The ticket was one of the items that helped us gain further information as to what was taking place with parking enforcement officer Boutote and one of the downtown establishments," Bruschi said in the e-mail.

In that case a parking ticket was issued to a local business employee parked at an expired meter. The employee was someone who Boutote knew, Bruschi said.

Proper dismissal procedure requires a form to be filled out explaining the dismissal – in this case it was indicated the parking meter had malfunctioned. The town’s meter department is required to confirm malfunctions before tickets are dismissed, but Hughes allegedly bypassed that step and had the ticket dismissed by the court, Bruschi said. The meter did not malfunction, he added.

“It was a single incident, but we felt that a very strong message had to be sent that our procedures need to be followed by the letter of the law,” Bruschi said in an e-mail.

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