Someone has decided to encourage civic engagement by posting fake City of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»notices, but only in one very specific area.
The notices appeared very recently along East 15th Avenue near John Hendry Park and Trout Lake. About a dozen are stapled to trees over a two-block area, between Victoria Drive and the SkyTrain tracks, as of Monday, January 27.
"The City did not put up the notice on the poles," associate director of parking management, Alina Cheng confirms in an email to V.I.A.
The notices encourage people to regarding resident parking regulations. The city is in the midst of collecting public feedback on changes around resident-only parking signs versus a resident parking permit.
The City of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»did issue a public notice about the survey, but the letters were mailed to residents in the area.
"Notices for parking surveys are hand-delivered to mailboxes," Cheng says.
Whoever created the fake letters recreated real-looking City of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»letterhead and used text from the city's letter and website.
But they also added a dramatic headline: "RESIDENTS!" reads the fake notice. "THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!!! PLEASE READ, TAKE A PICTURE AND TAKE THE SURVEY!!!"
The phony signs also left out some things, like encouraging people in rental suites to participate.
The fake notices include a sign-off from the Parking Management Branch, which issued the original notice.
Encouraging civic participation is good, adds Cheng, but using the city's logo is not. Such notices can cause confusion.
"Utilizing the City’s logo to impersonate an official notice is not acceptable," she says.
