Parking cheats: The meter beaters

Across from the College of Charleston library, Mike McCann opens the gray housing of a parking meter and sticks a small screwdriver into a slot.

"Bingo," he says, fishing out a gum wrapper.

McCann has been fixing the city's meters for 18 years. He's pulled out razor blades, crushed beer bottle caps, paper clips, rubber bands, "just about anything you can imagine."

One time, before the city swapped its mechanical meters with electric ones, someone strapped a yellow bra around a lever to keep the meter's flag up. "The worst is the bubble gum," he says, after fixing five of the eight meters on that block. "You don't know who's chewed it."

McCann is one half of the city's meter repair unit. Every year, he and Bryan Smith fix about 13,000 meters.

Some fail because their batteries die, or for some other legitimate malfunction.

But about 4,000 last year were jammed by people trying to cheat the city out of a few quarters, so they could park in spaces longer than the allotted time, or for some reasons that still leave McCann scratching his head.

One time someone, maybe a testy contractor, drilled holes into a few meters. "That was completely senseless; it just cost taxpayers more money," McCann said. "Maybe they were mad."

Does this vandalism make him mad?

"Not anymore. It's one of those things you get used to," he said, joking that the cheaters give him "job security."

The College of Charleston is meter-beater central.

Sometimes McCann and his partner will fix a row of meters, "and on my way back, they'll all be jammed again." He's caught people in the act. "There's not much I can do about it," he said. His bosses "tell me just to fix the meters."

Damaging a meter is a crime, said Hernan Pena, city traffic and transportation director, though he couldn't recall a time when the city prosecuted anyone for jamming a meter.

Read more Monday in the Post and Courier. Read more investigative stories on Watchdog.