Motorists in Aspen were surprised earlier this spring when parking meter charges appeared months after credit cards were used.
Only a handful of the downtown parking meters experienced the problem: instead of billing a user’s card within a few seconds, the charge didn’t register for up to two months, causing the transactions to show up on statements well after the time of sale.
According to parking director Mitch Osur, the late charges were because three meters had gone “offline. He says the problem has since been corrected.
“Yes it might have been 30 days or 60 days after they had parked, but nobody got mischarged and there was actually zero revenue lost,” said Osur.
A total of $7,700 in parking department revenue was on hold this spring.
Osur said this incident is not related to the batch-process issue with previous software. That multi-year scam cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars because people were using zeroed-out prepaid debit cards to pay for parking.