Other parking racket horror stories rolled in on his Facebook page. A downtown art gallery's intern -- towed. A graduate school assistant -- towed, and
forced to pay $300 after weekend storage.
"I guess I won't eat the rest of the month," he quipped.
A man towed over a case of mistaken license plates: the meter reader logged zeroes instead of the letter O, generating a record of tickets that didn't exist.

Even if you pay -- or think you paid -- all your parking fines,
record-keeping snafus can still mark your car with a scarlet letter -- or in this case, a green tow tag.
In an 8-minute filmed encounter with an
impatient city employee named Richard, Flakne discovered a confusing record of his son's parking fines. He had paid all of them -- he thought -- online, but a balance of $135 remained.
"I really don't know what's due," Flakne tells Richard, after going through the city's records. "
We thought everything had been taken care of." "If he was worried about it,
he should have called us to make sure everything was paid in full instead of doing everything on line," Richard tells Flakne about his son.
But Matthes has pushed all of his departments to
do more work online, from utilities to parking fine payments. And "most things in the modern world are paid online," a surprisingly calm Flakne says.
"If you're worried about being towed, you probably should take responsibility and
call down here," Richard interrupts.
Flakne asks for more clarification after reviewing the records again. "I don't mean to be rude,
but I'm not going to sit here and go through this all day," Richard says. "I just don't see this going anywhere."
FLAKNE'S CASH PAYMENT FOR HIS SON'S OUTSTANDING TICKETS: $135
TOTAL PAID, ALL CASH: $380. Columbia city officials wonder why the Internet is trouncing sales -- and sales taxes. Jefferson City, which has no metered parking around its downtown merchants,
just announced a $1.5 million sales tax surplus.