Parking machines' acid bath costs city $40,000

Tauranga City Council has revealed it spent $40,000 last year to repair some of the city's new pay-and-display parking machines after an acid attack.
The costly act of vandalism came to light following a complaint by Tauranga woman Sarah Hall about parking machines in the CBD, some of which she said were faulty.
Miss Hall said she received a ticket after parking on The Strand last year and finding that not only did the parking machine not take her coins, but its text-to-park feature was also faulty.
She immediately phoned the council to tell them about the problem.
Soon after, she saw a parking warden, and after telling him she had alerted council to the problem, he told her some machines had been vandalised with acid.
"He said a lot of them had actually been vandalised and some sort of acid had been poured into the coin slots," Miss Hall said.
Tauranga City Council transportation operations manager Martin Parkes confirmed 15 pay-and-display machines outside the city CBD were damaged by hydrochloric acid on September 15.
No security cameras were in the area of the vandalism.
Mr Parkes said a formal complaint was laid with police but no one was caught.
It cost about $40,000 to repair the machines, which were out of order for a week.
Following the vandalism, the machines automatically shut down, displayed an "out of order" digital read-out, and parking wardens kept a close watch on them.
Old parking meters in the city were replaced at the start of last year with 125 computerised, solar-powered, pay-and-display machines as part of a $1.1 million project.
The change was made due to concerns over vandalism of the old single-head meters and their vulnerability to theft.
Miss Hall contacted the Bay of Plenty Times after reading about fellow resident Tony Mills, who is refusing to pay two parking tickets he received last year because he says his legitimate coins were rejected by the city's pay-and-display parking machines.
Miss Hall said that on several occasions she encountered faulty meters and left a note on her car dashboard to explain the situation, only to be given a ticket.
"That really annoys me, because it's not like I was being dishonest and had no intention of trying to pay for the ticket."
Meanwhile, Mr Mills is continuing his battle with the council over his tickets, and last week met Tauranga mayor Stuart Crosby to discuss the issue. Mr Mills said the meeting was a positive experience, and Mr Crosby intended to look further into the issue.
Mr Mills said he had experienced further frustration just before Christmas, when he put a 50-cent coin in a parking machine on Devonport Rd.
The machine ought to have given him 15 minutes' parking time, however he said the machine recorded only six minutes.
"It's become a whole new science to go to town to park your car."