Over a dozen seniors were given parking tickets on Thursday as they attempted to access a meal program on Briar Avenue in Kamloops.

Caroline King, with the St. Vincent De Paul Society, says $100 parking tickets were given to each of the seniors from Precise Park-link, who have a small corporate office across the street from the non-profit.

King explains that some of the seniors had improperly parked in front of the Park-link office.

“We were in the process of moving those cars. I believe we missed a few sections of time during the day where she (the woman administering parking tickets) was able to ticket other people we didn’t see,” she explained.

“I’m not saying in any way that we weren’t affecting the business; I mean, clearly we were and we were working really hard to address it. There was nobody at the business at the time, so I wasn’t that concerned, as there’s rarely anybody there.”

King says when volunteers realized vehicles were being ticketed, they appealed to the Park-Link employee to allow them to get the seniors to move their cars.

Park Link (Photo: Google Maps)

“She (the Park Link employee) wasn’t open to conversation. I guess she has had problems with our parking in the past. Unlike everybody else, she was not open to a conversation around that and there doesn’t appear to be any way for us to work with her,” said King. “So she chose to ticket the seniors that came in for the meal program.”

King explains what seniors faced when they walked out and discovered they had parking tickets in their vehicles.

“She (the Park Link employee) would yell,” explained King. “We had one volunteer that’s been here forever, he is a big guy named Kelly, and he said to her ‘please, please give us a chance, we’ve got seniors coming, they are actively going to their cars, can we just give them a chance?'”

However, King explains the woman handing out the parking tickets continued to yell.

“Her exact words: ‘No, you do this every Thursday and Saturday, I’m ticketing you all!'”

One witness RadioNL has spoken to alleges the Park-Link employee gave them the finger.

“Two ladies were crying and one was being consoled by a lovely member from the gym. I’d like to give a shout-out to the Heavy Metal Gym, those guys come and stand up for us every time, it doesn’t matter what it is,” expressed King.

“We had one lady that was distraught because she was going to have to pay for that ticket and now she didn’t have Christmas. I kept saying to her I’m gonna get this covered, but it didn’t sink in.”

Photo showing how it appears to have three rows of parking (Photo: Caroline King)

King explains the layout for parking at the nearby gym makes it look like there is a third row of parking, which she adds is confusing for the seniors sometimes.

However, she says they have shared parking with Heavy Metal Gym over the years, and are in communication with each other if there are any issues or concerns.

“We’ve always allowed other businesses to use our parking in any way that benefits them so that we’re all sort of good neighbors to each other,” said King. “Our parking is frequently used up and unavailable to us to our volunteers. So we all contact each other and if some of my people get into another place, they will call me and I get them to move and if they get into my spots and I need to space, I call them and they move; it’s worked really, really well.”

NL News made repeated attempts to contact Park-Link for comment but were transferred around, eventually landing back at the main switchboard.