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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
As many as 20 people received $50 parking tickets for leaving their vehicles on an Old Town sidewalk over the weekend while attending the Midnight Sun Float Plane Fly-In event at the Wardair float base on Back Bay.

One of those people was musician Jim Taylor, who was performing.

"So, there was eight to 12 vehicles parked off the road but parked on the sidewalk on Friday," he said. "The bylaw guys just wrote tickets and took pictures of the vehicles."

Taylor said the officers could have warned the offenders first.

"My point is, instead of bylaw coming in and arbitrarily taking pictures and writing tickets, they could have come in and said, 'would you mind asking people if they can move their vehicles - they are illegally parked,'" he said. "Everybody would have done that."

Taylor said he took the ticket off his own windshield and planned to pay the fine - when when Fly-In event co-ordinator Yvonne Quick gathered up all the tickets and said she was going over to city hall on Monday to dispute them.

"My point is discretion and common sense," Talyor continued. "We have few enough tourists coming to Yellowknife as it is - let's not make them angry."

Quick added the vehicles weren't fully parked on the Wiley Road sidewalk.

"Actually the cars were not parked on the sidewalk," she said. "The bumper was sitting over the sidewalk; the wheels weren't on."

Quick said that in the nine years she has been involved in organizing the Float Plane Fly-In, and in the three years she has been involved with the return of the beer barge event, there have never been parking tickets issued.

"I think that is a shame," she said. "Here we are trying to promote tourism and people coming to Yellowknife to participate in these events, and we can't help it that they never figured there wouldn't be parking in those areas.

"I don't think it is very good public relations for the city and I didn't feel they were obstructing the sidewalk that badly - you could step down and walk around, and most units you could walk by."

Quick also felt there should have been some warning and that no one was told beforehand that they were illegally parked on the sidewalk. Quick confirmed she collected most of the tickets and plans on going to city hall to protest.

But Mayor Gord Van Tighem, who was at the event on Friday when the first tickets were handed out, has a different take on how the targeted vehicles were parked.

"Any of them that were ticketed were 100 per cent on the sidewalk," he said. "There were pictures taken of each one just to confirm that."

Van Tighem argued the bylaw officers were just doing their jobs and were responding to complaints.

"All of the tickets issued were based on complaints received," he said. "The first one was from a woman with a baby stroller who had to go almost half a block on the road with the stroller - and she was quite concerned and phoned in a complaint."

Van Tighem also disputed the fact that people attending the event were not warned about parking on the sidewalk.

"There was several city employees there and they pointed out you don't park on the sidewalk - it is just common sense," he said. "At that time everyone who got a ticket was told don't park on the sidewalk. 'You're fine as long as you're off the sidewalk.' And some of them repeated it the next day."

Meanwhile, Van Tighem said organizers of next weekend's Ramble and Ride festival have done a better job this year co-ordinating with the city to find solutions to the parking problems they've experienced. Last year, more than a dozen vehicles were ticketed and three were towed.

"This year, they will have parking greeters - people will be directed about where to go," he said. "For the Old Town Ramble and Ride, there was significantly more effort being put in by people organizing it."

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