GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Holiday parking on Grand Rapids streets is supposed to be free. But for years, people were paying on holidays because of a mistake on a smartphone app.

It’s a story you probably have never heard before, because city officials kept quiet about it after the problem was discovered in 2022. By then, the app had been mistakenly allowing holiday payments for more than three years, apparently since the MOTU parking app was introduced in Grand Rapids.

Nobody noticed until Shannon Tanis says she parked on a downtown street on a holiday and used the app.  

“I had paid and I was like, ‘Wait a minute.’ I realized there was supposed to be free (parking) on holidays,'” she said.  

She says the app didn’t warn her off or refuse the payment. She did some research.

Tanis says she keeps a critical eye on local government, so she knew who to call: City Comptroller Max Frantz.

“Shannon reached out to me,” said Frantz, the official city financial watchdog. “She had done some testing herself and some documentation.”

Frantz says he checked some audit reports and found that the MOTU app was indeed collecting money on holidays when city policy dictates free parking. The app was supposed to block payments on holidays, but the comptroller says that message somehow never got to the app contractor.  

“For some reason, that transmission didn’t occur or there was an issue with it,” Frantz said.

He says city parking officials fixed the problem. Now, they say they program the app every year to make sure it prevents holiday payments.

All told, according to Frantz, there were more than 36,000 unnecessary parking payments totaling more than $81,000.  

Tanis, who discovered the mistake, says the city government should refund the money.  

“They just need to do the right thing,” she said.

Tanis contacted Target 8 investigators after she saw our story in June about a city policy that puts a four-year limit on refunds of water and sewer overbilling and a man who says the city overbilled his business thousands of dollars for 10 years and only paid back part of it.

The city decided not to refund the mistaken parking payments, either.

“I had suggested to the director of MobileGR at that time that at minimum he consider evaluating what a refund would look like,” Frantz said.  

He says it would have been possible to refund the thousands of parking payments, but it would take a lot of work. He says he’s comfortable with the city decision not to.  

“I think there are a lot of things to take into consideration,” he said.

“The remarkable thing about this story,” Frantz said, “is that it really just took one resident to document something and get in touch with someone at city hall willing to take a hard look at this.”