Meet Barbara Pratt, Falmouth's Parking Ticket Hearing Officer
When Barbara Pratt responded to a 2004 newspaper advertisement seeking a hearing magistrate at town hall, she did not really know what she was getting herself into.
Unsure of what the job entailed exactly, Ms. Pratt applied anyway, figuring her 25-year career with the Social Security Administration would make her a good fit for the role. A Natick native, Ms. Pratt spent summers throughout her childhood in Falmouth and made the move here with her husband after her early retirement in 2000. All that time spent working with and interpreting laws would translate well to a new context, she thought.
“I had been the manager of the hearing office for the Social Security Administration in both Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts,” Ms. Pratt said. “I thought, ‘Hearings? I can do hearings. I managed the hearing office, so yeah, I can do hearings.’”
The first thing she learned at her interview was that the ad actually contained a mistake: the position did not pay $15 an hour as advertised; instead it was just $1,500 a year. But Ms. Pratt did not let that dissuade her: “That’s okay,” she said. “It might be fun.’”
Ms. Pratt’s first official day as Falmouth’s parking ticket hearing officer was September 28, 2004. She is employed by the town, not the police department, and is not in charge of writing any parking tickets herself. The main task of her job is pretty straightforward: anyone who is issued a parking ticket in the Town of Falmouth has the right to appeal it, and those appeal decisions are up to Ms. Pratt to make. But the number of appeals can vary greatly depending on the season.
“I just happened to close out my files for 2021 over the weekend, so I know that I did 330 appeals in 2021,” Ms. Pratt said. “It’s very, very different in the summer. I have way more written appeals to do, often because the people have gone home to other states and they have to write [because] they can’t come into a hearing. We have more people writing tickets in the summer, so that’s why I have more appeals.”
Falmouth’s population more than triples in the summer, during which time Ms. Pratt’s designated one hour for hearings each week at town hall can quickly morph into a more time-consuming affair. The volume of appeals can fluctuate depending on the time of year, but technology has made the process a bit easier to bear for the town’s singular parking ticket hearing officer—for example, police officers now have handheld ticketing machines that take photo evidence of violations; an online appeals system has been implemented that allows people to file their claims virtually and Ms. Pratt has access to a database that stores data from all parking meters in town, making it very easy to check if there was payment in any given meter in town at any given time.
“It gives me something to lean on,” Ms. Pratt said. “It used to be that people would just tell me their story, and I kind of had to determine whether they were telling the truth or not—and you can usually do that; if you’ve lived long enough, you can tell when people are lying to you. But now I have these pictures and the computer program that tells me how much they put in and when they put it in and all of that, so it makes it a little easier for me.”
Not everyone appeals their tickets to Ms. Pratt, but the ones who do keep her job interesting. Anyone who is unhappy with Ms. Pratt’s decision has the option to appeal it further at Barnstable County Superior Court, but it will cost $275 just to get on the docket.
“They usually wouldn’t appeal a $20 parking ticket for $275, although it has happened,” Ms. Pratt said. “In that case, it was a matter of ‘do you know who I am?’”
This type of attitude—which usually comes from a person’s assumption that rules and regulations do not apply to them specifically—is something Ms. Pratt has had to deal with intermittently throughout the years.
“Things get a little tense sometimes,” she said. “I had one young man barricade me in the hearing room; that was a little scary. I went to the phone in the hearing room to dial 911 and the phone jack came right out of the wall. So then I had to hold the phone jack in the wall and dial 911; meanwhile this guy is screaming at me that I’m a parking nazi.”
Dealing with people’s unchecked perceptions of their own privilege is not an easy task, but Ms. Pratt has seen enough to know how to deliver the proper dose of reality, if and when necessary.
Take the time, for example, a disgruntled man went to Ms. Pratt “in a tizzy” over his parking ticket, which had been issued at Falmouth Yacht Club. He said he was a member there, so she asked him how he managed to get a ticket, considering the parking is pretty well-marked. He told her that he liked to park in that specific spot, so he could watch his boat out on the harbor.
“So let me understand this,” Ms. Pratt remembered saying, “you’re a member of Falmouth Yacht Club, you like to park where you park so you can watch your boat in the harbor, and your life sucks?”
“So he said, ‘alright, I’ll pay it,’” Ms. Pratt said. “It was 20 bucks.”
Over the years, Ms. Pratt has learned that the best way to deal with this kind of “do you know who I am?” attitude is to be honest and straightforward.
“I sometimes really don’t know who they are,” Ms. Pratt said. “So I’m like ‘no, I don’t know who you are, do you want to tell me?’ Sometimes it’s a matter of ‘you should know better,’ and sometimes it’s a matter of ‘that’s really not relevant in this case.’ And I’ll tell them that; it’s really not relevant who you are or what your position is. If you got a ticket for doing this, prove to me that you didn’t do it and then we’ll talk. But they can’t, usually.”
Just as easy as she can dole out harsh doses of reason in her decisions, Ms. Pratt is able to exercise empathy and compassion. Once, a man came before her with a ticket for not paying a parking meter. She asked him why he did not pay, and he said it was because he did not know how to feed a meter.
“I said, ‘How can you not know how to run a parking meter?’ and he said, ‘Well I’ve been in jail for 30 years, so I never learned how to operate one,’” Ms. Pratt recalled.
Chalking it up to a learning experience, Ms. Pratt decided to waive his ticket and even used her diagram of a parking meter to show the man how it worked, where the coins went, and how to read it to ensure it was properly paid.
“I felt bad,” she said. “Yes, he had parked over time, but I made the decision to waive it.”
Ensuring fairness in the application of the law is one of the pillars of Ms. Pratt’s job and one that she takes very seriously. One of the questions she was asked when she first interviewed with the town was whether she would make one of her interviewers pay a fine for parking over the time limit if they came before her.
“I said, ‘Well, I’d tell you to pay it,’” Ms. Pratt recalled. “He said that was the answer [he] wanted… They don’t want anybody to be favored in town.”
Back before her time, it was possible to slyly get a parking ticket dismissed if you knew the right people, but under Ms. Pratt, that does not happen anymore. Ms. Pratt said that she has developed great working relationships through her work, especially with the police department, and that the officers know she is fair. Officers routinely tell people that if they disagree with their ticket they are welcome to go before Barbara for an appeal, but that is often misinterpreted by people who think that if they do go before Ms. Pratt, the ticket will magically disappear.
“That’s not what that means,” Ms. Pratt said. “It means, ‘let’s not fight about this in the middle of Water Street in Woods Hole. Go file your appeal and see how you make out.’”
In addition to hearing parking ticket appeals, Ms. Pratt is chairwoman of the Traffic Advisory Committee. She appointed a co-chairman, Officer James Porter of the Falmouth Police Department, and together, they work with their small committee—which includes one designee each from the police department, the select board, the planning department, and the department of public works—to ensure that all things traffic-related run smoothly throughout town.
“We meet once a month and we hear various issues regarding traffic, parking, signage, the bikeways, pedestrians, all of that,” Ms. Pratt said. “People who have called Jim Porter and put their concern on the agenda come before us and tell us what the issue is and then between the five of us, we usually can come up with a solution for whatever the problem is. If we can’t, we schedule a site visit and we all go out to where this is happening, whatever the problem is, to see what is going on.”
The committee is intended to act as a sort of filter and proactively address problems brought forth by the public before it reaches the level of town manager, Ms. Pratt said. It also promotes a sort of synergy and a “better together” attitude for different departments around town.
“The part that I like most is communicating with all the different departments [and] getting all the departments to work as a unit, not against each other but with each other,” Ms. Pratt said. “I like to know what’s going on in town and it’s nice to have someone you can go to about pretty much anything in town.”
Ms. Pratt’s favorite part of her job, in her own words, is being able to keep her finger in the pie and give back to the community that has felt like home to her since childhood.
“I like doing something for the town,” she said. “I get to pay back the town of Falmouth for all the joy it has brought me… Falmouth was always the dream for me, and here I am. Unbelievable. I never would’ve thought that I’d end up in Falmouth. I grew up here [during the] summers and I enjoyed every minute of it, and to be able to be here is like a dream come true.”