A Jim Thorpe councilman used the public comment period at last Thursday’s workshop to criticize the borough’s own parking enforcement, saying a local beer distributor was ticketed while making a delivery to a downtown restaurant.

Councilman Lyle Augustine said Highland Beverage, the distributor at 140 Susquehanna St., was servicing Molly Maguire’s Pub around 2 p.m. last Monday when a parking attendant wrote the truck up.

“They parked where they always park and have for decades,” Augustine said. “They were loading and unloading. They weren’t staying. Our parking enforcement issued them a citation for being in a non-parking spot.”

Augustine had the ticket with him Thursday.

“Our parking attendants issued the beer delivery truck from our town servicing a restaurant from our town,” he said. “I personally don’t think that’s appropriate. This is a long-standing local business that is servicing other long-standing local businesses, and to me, it seems very distasteful. And I think its kind of adding to the unfriendliness of the parking authority downtown.”

Police Chief Joseph Schatz addressed the matter, but declined to give the department’s account in open session.

“If I may jump in, I know the story of it,” Schatz said. “There are two sides to that story. I won’t explain it in open floor, but I’d be more than glad to share it with (council), because it’s personnel.”

Augustine framed the ticket against what Mondays look like for downtown merchants.

“On a Monday in downtown Jim Thorpe, it’s a bunch of businesses recouping from their weekends that are crazy,” he said. “They’re restocking. They’re trying to manage, figuring out what’s going to be coming for the upcoming week and the next weekend.”

Parking enforcement downtown has come up before, he said, and he credited the borough with making progress.

“It’s been brought up over the last couple of months,” Augustine said. “I think we’ve been working on it, and things have been better. But something like this, to me, just doesn’t seem right. And if I stand alone up here, so be it. But I don’t believe that it’s appropriate.”

The complaint landed during a week when downtown business was already down. A rock slide along Route 209 west of Jim Thorpe damaged the railroad and closed a stretch of the highway, and Reading & Northern has moved Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway operations to Nesquehoning.

“This weekend, we had kind of a tragedy that’s prohibiting the train from running out of town, so it’s pretty much going to slow town down quite a bit,” Augustine said. “I think that Sunday and Monday and Tuesday of this week were definitely signs of that.”

Parking revenue came up later in the meeting, from a different direction. Council President Connor Rodgers said the governing body had discussed raising fines at a budget session the night before.

“We’re having discussions of other income sources other than raising taxes, and that’s one of them,” Rodgers said.

Schatz said state law limits how far the borough can go.

“There’s a $50 cap on fines, because we tried to do that on our permit parking on West Broadway, and that’s as high as we can go,” Schatz said.