Part Two: the Great Gelato Parking Dust up: now it gets rough

Motorists enraged over parking flaps outside gelato shop                   

The New Mexican  9/10/2011 Gelato — the frozen Italian desert similar to ice cream — is sweet and cool. But some parking disputes in front of O-Gelato on North Guadalupe Street have become bitter and heated in recent months.                                                    

       O-Gelato owner David Maple said his lease at 301 N. Guadalupe St., next to a FedEx Office, assigns his business six parking spaces in front of his shop. But keeping those spots open for his customers, he said, has been "work."                                             

    He posted signs that designate the spaces as parking only for O-Gelato customers, he said, but people have ignored the signs and keep parking in his spots while they go to FedEx next door or have lunch across the street.    "At first we would ask people not to park there and they would just thumb their noses at us or give us the finger," he said. "Some people just look at us and say, 'You can't do anything about it,' and they would walk away."                

Maple said he tried opening his shop a little later — at 2 p.m. instead of at noon — to "accommodate" people lunching in the area, but that didn't work, either.     "They think when we are closed it's OK," he said of noncustomers who use the parking spots. "But we have deliveries coming in and we need those spaces."                            

After talking to other business owners and checking laws, Maple said, he decided to start using boots to immobilize vehicles of noncustomers and charging the owners $75 to have the boot removed. 

COMMENT: $75!!!!!

         "The response is heartbreaking," Maple said. "People are very angry — most of the time I have to ask them, 'Please don't yell at me.' I had to call the police because we had a FedEx driver threaten me with a bat. He was taking up four spaces and he flipped off my wife, and when I said, 'Don't do that' and told him 'Next time I'm going to boot you,' he said he would come back with a bat. One man told me to 'F-off' and I said, 'Hey, wait a minute,' and he apologized and came in later for a gelato. We try to be reasonable."    (But not ‘heartbreaking’ enough to stop booting parkers.)        

          Andrea Hare, whose car was booted in front of O-Gelato on Aug. 2, said she is so unhappy with how she was treated by Maple and one of his employees when she parked there one day to mail something at FedEx that she is considering filing a lawsuit.                   

            When Hare returned to her car, it had been booted and a man who identified himself as an employee at O-Gelato told her she'd have to pay $75 to have the boot removed, she said. "I said, 'You are not even open. What is going on?' I tried to have a dialogue with him and reason with him to get him to remove it. I asked him, 'Why are you doing this?' And he said to me, 'This is how we make money.' It feels like extortion to me."                                         

     So Grais showed up with cash, Hare said, at which point Maple came out and called them names and accused them of not being able to read. Hare said when she asked for a receipt, Maple went back inside the shop and closed the door.   

        "When I knocked, he said he was going to call the police if I didn't leave," she said. "I said, 'Go ahead.' He closed the door and then came out and threw a receipt at me. It's just such bad energy for Santa Fe." 

(COMMENT:  Ah, the perfect Santa Fe emotional response.)                 

            Matt Lange, a real estate agent from Denver, said he had a bad experience after parking in front of O-Gelato on Aug. 17.    "It was about 10 minutes to two," Lange said. "There was a closed sign in the [O-Gelato] window. I was planning on running into [FedEx Office] for a few minutes to make some copies."                                   

      Lange said he ended up spending about 40 minutes making copies. When he got back, his truck had been booted. He said a man inside O-Gelato who didn't identify himself asked for $65 and told him that was less than the $150 a tow truck would charge and cheaper than the $75 he had been charging the week before.  Lange said the man charged his credit card $55 and said he would "eat the difference."                                                                                
      Lange said he saw the signs when he parked but noted that the gelato shop was closed. He said he figured the worst that could happen was that he would get a ticket. "I think you need a license before you are booting people," Lange said. "You can't just go Wild West out there."   (Yes, you can, for a while.  The New Mexican is just nailing Maple.)