This article was published on July 19, 1994.
Black tights and tutus. Wings and a bag of nickels. Look, it’s the Parking Fairies, flitting through downtown Anchorage on a dreary Monday morning, feeding expired meters, saving delinquent parkers from $10 tickets.
Linny Pacillo and Susan Pacillo-Reinhart, sisters in the family that owns Courtney's Gas station on Tudor Road, are irritated at the Anchorage Parking Authority. Enforcement is overzealous, they say, and officials are cold- hearted toward people who, after all, have just made a small mistake.
Take Linny for instance. The guy she bought her "big, shiny double king cab super deluxe red pickup" from put the little renewal sticker on the wrong side of the rear plate. The sticker was definitely on the plate, just on the wrong side.
She didn't notice.
She got a $75 dollar ticket.
She presented proof that the truck was indeed properly registered, but an appeal officer would only reduce the fine to $25.
Linny was not appeased. "Twenty-five dollars is outrageous for something I did not mean to do," she said. "So, I'm mad now. And I got a big mouth."
Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to make the Pacillo sisters mad. They believe in revenge and have an abnormal tolerance for embarrassing themselves in public. Nothing is too tacky if done for a good cause, especially for Linny, especially if she can con sister Susan into playing along.
"She's still mad at me for having to dress up in a bikini and pump gas in the middle of the winter for our winter beach party," Linny said, plugging a couple of nickels in a near-expired meter across from the courthouse, oblivious to the stares of damp tourists who wondered to each other if she was part of some weird welcome wagon.
Peeved at the parking authority, the Pacillo sisters put a giant milk bottle on the counter at the gas station and invited contributions, which they promised to use to save people whose meters had expired. So to speak.
They got $86 and rounded it off to $100.
They also asked for sad ticket tales, with $75 in free gas promised for the most outrageous enforcement encounter.
Viki Fuller is a contender for first place. "My kids were in a spelling bee at the PAC. Thirteen-year-old twins. First and second at their school. It was pretty cool," Fuller said.
She is handicapped, and parked her properly-registered car with proper handicap permits in a handicap space.
"They broke for lunch. When we got back, I parked in another handicap space down and around the corner from the first one, and I found a ticket when I got back."
She called, assuming it was an error, but was told it's illegal to park twice in the same block in the same day.
"The sign doesn't say that," Fuller said. "I had no clue."
She still hasn't paid the ticket. "I can't afford to," she said. "I'm a welfare mom. . . . Besides, I thought the whole thing was pretty stupid."
Another contender is the man whose story goes like this: "I go in to pay my sap-sucking lawyer $2,000. I come out and I have a ticket for parking 10 inches from the curb."
If true, this is a good appeal case. The law says you can park up to 18 inches from the curb.
Public reaction to the appearance of the Parking Fairies Monday was what one might expect. "Thank you," yelled a Volkswagen owner whose meter showed a red flag before Susan stuck some nickels in it.
"God loves you."
"What's the occasion?" asked Gil Springer from New Orleans.
"The parking authority has p----d me off," said Linny, subsidizing his Alaska experience with a couple of nickels.
"They'll do that, won't they," nodded Springer.
On I Street, between Fourth and Fifth avenues, the inevitable happened. The Parking Fairies crossed paths with a meter man, one of the Burns security guards who have a contract to write tickets.
He looked bemused and just laughed when Linny suggested he get out of the rain because there wouldn't be any tickets to write this day.
An hour later, as the Parking Fairies fed meters in the Post Office Mall parking lot, the chief parking enforcer himself showed up. He didn't seem worried about lost revenue.
"I think it's delightful," said Dave Harbour. "And a good promotion for your gas station," he added pointedly.
Harbour donated a couple of quarters to the effort and presented the sisters with a rose each, purloined from the Saturday Market garden, and a souvenir mug.
Contrary to popular belief, tickets writers don't have quotas and don't work on commission he said. In fact, projections indicate income from parking tickets will be down more than $30,000 this year, a sign of "an increase in voluntary compliance," according to Harbour.
The authority took in about $2 million last year in ticket income, he said. Along with $4 million in other income, it goes to pay off bonds used to finance construction of the downtown parking garage in the 1980s.
One reason Harbour wasn't concerned about the Parking Fairies is he knows the Pacillo sisters can't afford to save delinquent meter feeders for long. Linny and Susan know it, too. They hope to provide an example that others will copy.
“Pass it on,” Susan said. “If you’re walking down the street and see a red flag, put a nickel in the meter and save someone $10.”