Group reimburses woman for $200 tow
Gilroy – Downtown streets and sidewalks will soon get a facelift and a new arts center will appear in Gilroy’s historic core. But it’s good-old fashioned good will that a local business group relied on to win back one disillusioned customer.
Without any fanfare, members of the Downtown Business Association wrote a check in September for more than $200 to Maryalice Ritti. The money was intended as a reimbursement after the owner of Garlic City Billiards, at 7500 Monterey St., towed her car.
“Hats off to the Gilroy Downtown Business Association for turning our negative experience around. Apology accepted!” wrote Susie MacKenzie, one of Ritti’s friends, to the Dispatch.
In June, Ritti joined the expanding list of people whose cars Bob Tapella has towed from the lot behind his pool hall. Ritti had dined at OD’s Kitchen, which according to signs posted in the lot, shares the parking area with the pool hall.
Her car was safe while she ate, but she ran afoul of Tapella’s unwritten parking regulations when she left her vehicle there beyond the diner’s 2pm closing. When she returned about 3:30pm from shopping, her car was gone.
“All of us are working really hard to make the downtown … a place where people want to go,” said Larry Mickartz, vice president of the downtown association. “While he was in his legal rights to have her towed, it’s not the spirit of downtown that we want to communicate.”
