BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto resident Jay Chesavage says he parked at Town and Country Village the other day to bring tools to his wife across the street and get a smoothie from Jamba.
When he returned to his car after 45 minutes, Chesavage found a notice on his windshield that looked like a parking ticket, demanding he pay $63 for walking off of the shopping center’s property. The notice from a private company is part of a broader strategy by the owners of Town and Country to prevent non-customers from using their parking lot.
Town and Country hired Parking Control Service to issue the notices, according to Joan Fantazia, the shopping center’s general manager.
“As you know, our location is highly desirable, which creates challenges with unauthorized parking,” Fantazia said in an email. “Students from Paly and Stanford often use the village to avoid paying for parking, and we experience similar issues during Stanford Football games.”
Visitors to Palo Alto Medical Foundation and car wash employees also use the lot, Fantasia said. Chesavage was headed to the Opportunity Center where his wife works at 33 Encina Ave. “It just didn’t occur to me that it would be prohibited,” he said.
Chesavage said he’s not planning on paying the fine.
“Demanding payment under false pretenses is more commonly known as a scam, and I’m sure your business doesn’t want to be known as operating a scam,” Chesavage said in a Dec. 13 letter to the shopping center and Parking Control Service.
Parking Control Service is based in San Francisco and has been in business since 1997. On its website, there’s an option to pay fines and information advertising its “fee notice” service to shopping centers.
The fee notices are a cheaper and less intrusive approach than towing, the company says. “Our business model has undergone a lengthy and thorough investigation by the California government, ensuring full legal compliance by our firm. Parking Control Service is the only firm doing this type of business 100% within California law,” the website says.
Representatives for the company haven’t returned a request for comment since Tuesday. Police Capt. James Reifschneider referred questions about the arrangement to Town and Country management.
Town and Country has been owned since 2005 by Ellis Partners, led by James Ellis and Melinda Ellis Evers.
They lost a chunk of their parking when developer Ed Storm fenced off a parking lot that they had leased at 70 Encina Ave.
Storm is planning to build 10 condos there, and the Ellis Partners are fighting the project. “We believe that added residents and vehicles will likely create an unmanageable parking situation in this already busy location,” said Dean Rubinson, director of development for the Ellis Partners, at an Architectural Review Board hearing in December 2023.
I’m SO tired of hearing the virtue-signallers claiming no one wants or drives cars so they can enrich their developer buddies / backers.
Get real already.
Parking at T&C has always been a challenge, even when Allison Cormack claimed otherwise to help the owners convert FROM retail to “medical/retail” which our highly paid “Planning” staff never even bothered to define or to notice that the landlord was kicking out EXISTING medical/retailers at the time.
Fortunately Lydia Kou and a bunch of us did our own retail survey and presented it to City Council to stop that craven nonsense which continues to this day for the University Ave which serves tens of thousands of commuters daily and on which we’re now going to waste $43,000,000 to widen the sidewalks.
I know it’s private property, but if put a ticket on my car, I won’t be shopping there any more. When the stores at T&C complain sales are down, they’ll know exactly who to blame — these fake cops.
This will last another week or two and they’ll never do it again. But the damage to T&C and its merchants will be long lasting.