It was street-sweeping day on the first Tuesday of the month in Capitol Hill, a prime time for issuing parking tickets in Denver. And vehicle-control agent Vincent Juarez had hit his stride.
His hand-held computer was set to “quick ticket” as Juarez — Denver’s No. 1 ticket issuer two years running — cranked out one per minute as he slowly drove his vehicle from car to car illegally parked on the east side of Logan Street north of East Eighth Avenue. The street sweepers were several blocks behind him as he tried to keep pace.
“Those sweepers can move quickly and get on us fast,” he said. “It’s nerve- racking.”
He punched the license plate number of a white Volkswagen Passat into the computer, hit the print button, attached the ticket to the yellow envelope and slipped it into the car door. It took a matter of seconds.
Next was a black Camaro, followed by a green Volvo. By the time he reached the end of the block, he had issued 12 tickets in less than 15 minutes. No one on the block had heeded the street-sweeping warnings.
Juarez was a security guard in the Webb Municipal Building about three years ago when he heard about a vacancy in parking control. When he told his father about his new job, the reaction was “You’re one of those guys,” Juarez recalled.
By his second year, in 2007, he was the top ticket writer. Last year, he led again, issuing 22,258 parking tickets, according to the city’s parking ticket database. About half were for parking on street-sweeping day.
He had the biggest four days last year, topped by the 404 tickets he wrote on Oct. 7, another street-sweeping day.
But Juarez downplays his prowess, simply saying “Really?” when informed of his numbers.
He said he gets his fair share of irate, screaming motorists, but he has never felt threatened.
“I let them vent,” Juarez said.
In recent years, the city has instituted a six-week training program for vehicle-control agents that includes role-playing sessions, called verbal judo, to prepare agents for angry people, said trainer Darnell Brooks.
Agents have had coffee thrown at them and been spit on, Brooks said.
Also, agents are on alert for tricks motorists employ to try to avoid tickets.
Some vehicle owners try to time the agents’ rounds. Juarez, the last of three parking agents on Logan that day, ticketed a car whose driver had watched one agent pass and then parked, apparently thinking it was safe.
Some vehicles get two tickets.
A Subaru Impreza on Pennsylvania Street gets one ticket for expired license plates and another for parking during street-sweeping hours. A Honda with a ticket stuck in the door from the night before for expired plates gets a second for parking in front of the street sweeper.
Juarez warned two men in a moving van to come back in 30 minutes after the street sweeper passed. When they still hadn’t moved five minutes later, he gave them a reminder. The nervous driver pulled away with the van’s rear doors still open.
Juarez’s favorite spot is the 500 block of Pennsylvania, where residents have stuck handmade signs into the ground warning against parking on street-sweeping days.
They include a poem:
The street they will sweepy
The parking ticket will make you weepy
So park away from this verse
And avoid the parking maids curse
It worked. The side of the street being swept that day was empty of cars.
