Let’s put $4 million ticket cop to work where he can really make hay

You gotta love Zulfiqar Khimani, Toronto’s top parking enforcement officer, who has written $3.922 million in tickets in the last four years.

My colleague Wendy Gillis reported today that the industrious Khimani issues an average of 59 tickets daily and made the province’s sunshine list of public employees earning more that $100,000 a year by working lots of overtime and six-day weeks.

He checked in at $101,467 last year - big coin for a guy issuing parking tickets and an outrage to some of those who posted comments to Gillis’ online story.

But I am totally okay with paying him that kind of dough, about 10 cents for every dollar of ticket revenue he generates. He earns it.

If some municipal employees were half as diligent, we’d be in much better shape around here.

Khimani’s approach borders on maniacal, but he is only enforcing local parking regulations as reflected by the signs on the street, most of which are not too hard to understand.

If you don’t want a ticket, find a legal parking spot. I don’t like it either, and I get lots of tickets for neglecting my own advice. But I always blame myself, or plain old bad luck.

He patrols the Forest Hill-Eglinton Ave. area and neighbourhoods north of it, which has me wondering how much money he’d bring in if he was in the downtown core, where fines are higher and there’s at least as much illegal parking.

I get a lot of complaints about vehicles parked in no-standing zones on busy downtown streets, such as document shredding trucks that block lanes to turn paper into little strips. I wrote last week about a shredder parked in the cycling lane right outside the Star building - a $150 fine – which already had a ticket under its wiper blade for parking on King St.

So let’s turn Khimani loose on downtown hotspots where illegal parking is rampant, and have him keep an eye on the new bike lanes on Sherbourne St., which are often blocked by delivery vehicles.

I bet he could pump his money average by a couple hundred grand a year.