By Jon Lender
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut State Police Commissioner Dora B. Schriro parked her official car in a handicapped spot at the Troop H barracks in Hartford late last year and now is apologizing.
Schriro said that she didn’t notice the large wheelchair logo painted on the pavement in the space because it was dark when she pulled in before dawn and when she pulled out that night.
But the incident, which has surfaced because someone took a picture of the car in the spot and sent it to The Courant, raises the question of why Schriro’s car remained unticketed all day outside of the police barracks where a person could expect to be cited for a $150 violation.
“I’m sorry – I can’t account for it,” she said when asked that question on the phone Wednesday.
On Thursday, a spokesman for Schriro’s agency, Scott DeVico, said an anonymous complaint has been received about the parking episode and is being handled by a procedure under which Schriro has provided a response that now will be reviewed by the state police commander, Col. Brian Meraviglia, who is her subordinate.
“I did park in the space. It was absolutely a mistake,” Schriro said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon concerning the incident that DeVico now says occurred Oct. 29 or Nov. 3. Schriro added: “If I had known it was a handicapped space I would not have parked there. ... It’s not something that I do.”
Schriro said it was the only time she has parked in a handicapped space and didn’t realize she’d done it until much later — perhaps weeks, she said — “when I happened to be at the troop at another date, and it was daytime and I was looking for a space [and] I saw the [handicapped] icon on the asphalt.”
After that, she said, she made a charitable donation to a group serving the disabled, the Disabled American Veterans. She said she’d already given to a different charity for the disabled earlier, before the parking incident, and will continue to do so. Her donations are in “three figures,” she said.
She also said she has made inquiries with state officials to be sure her department complies with handicapped parking standards.
Schriro recounted the incident as follows: On Oct. 29 or Nov. 3, she parked at Troop H, off Washington Street, leaving her car for the day so a state trooper could drive her from there to Bradley International Airport, where she took a flight on state business to Washington, D.C..
She flew back to Bradley and was picked up the night of the same day, she said, and, when she was dropped off at her state-issued car, she again didn’t notice the handicapped logo as she pulled out.
But someone else had noticed and anonymously sent the photograph in recent weeks to The Courant and at least one other news outlet.
Schriro said the handicapped space was “along the wall at the back of the troop” at the end of a line of staff parking spaces. She said she pulled in “approximately 4 or 5 in the morning” and “mistook that for a staff parking space.”
She has served since January 2014 as Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s appointee as commissioner of the state’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, which includes the state police.
“What I’ve learned since” the parking incident, Schriro said Wednesday, “is that handicapped spaces are supposed to be marked both with an icon on the asphalt, but also with a sign” at either eye level on a wall, or on a post. There’s no such eye-level sign on the spot at Troop H, she said.
She said that “some number of weeks” after the episode, once she knew what she’d done, she called Jonathan Slifka, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s liaison to the disability community, “because I felt badly and I wanted to convey this to him, but it also occurred to me that there may be issues at any number of our other parking lots” at about 60 state police facilities around Connecticut.
Schriro said she then followed up with Commissioner Melody Currey of the Department of Administrative Services and made “a pretty broad request” centering on questions such as: “Do we have the right number of spaces, are they in the right locations, and is there the correct signage?”
“I feel very badly,” Schriro said. “I’ve taken every action that I can to ensure’” that no one else will make the same mistake.
Currey confirmed Thursday that Schriro talked to her just before Christmas in December, and “I told her we would be out to evaluate” the situation. Currey, a former motor vehicles commissioner, said she’s been told that judges throw out cases in which people are ticketed for parking in handicapped spots that aren’t marked both on the pavement and with an eye-level sign.
The fine for a first-time violator who parks in a handicapped space is $150. It jumps to $250 for a second offense. Only vehicles displaying a handicapped plate or placard may park in such spaces, although an ambulance transporting a patient can park in a handicapped space 15 minutes while assisting the patient.
Photos of Schriro’s car in the handicapped space were being sent to reporters around the time she called Currey, but Schriro said she made the call on her own, before she received any word that someone had photographed her car in the space. “The first that I realized that anybody else had taken notice was the latter part of December,” she said.
“Mistakes happen — everyone makes them,” Malloy said in a statement. “She’s proactively rectified them to the extent she can. While this mistake is unfortunate, it was just that — a mistake. She’s done the right thing to correct it.”
Copyright 2016 The Hartford Courant