STUPID City of Meadville

I'm quite ticked off right now... Almost every week we have a meeting in Meadville for work. We have to park on the side of the street an feed the meter $.50 every time for 2 hours of parking. No big deal. A few months ago our meeting went over 2 hours long and I came out to see that I had a parking ticket on my Jeep. $3. No big deal. So I swung over to one of the drop off boxes, put 3 dollar bills in the envelope and was on my way. The other day I received one of those postcards in the mail saying that the post office has a letter for me that I need to sign for. When I went to pick it up, the guy at the post office had me sign 2 or 3 different things. I was completely confused as to what was going on, but thought that it might have to do with something for work. When I got back to my Jeep I opened the letter and saw that I was being "Summoned" to appear in court! I'm guessing that they didn't get the lousy $3 that dropped off at the stupid drop off box. (which means the stupid drop off box is POINTLESS). I read the letter to see what my options were. Basically it comes down to me pleading guilty (which I'm not) and shelling out $97.50 of pleading not guilty and paying $50 to go to court and give my plea. What the heck!?! $50 to go to court to plea not guilty for a fine of $97.50. Does this make any sense to anyone? I'm not going to lie, this is the most ticked off I have been about something in a while. I don't know what good going to court would be, seeing that I paid my $3 ticket in cash instead of writing a check and having a copy of the check as proof. The only time I have ever gotten in trouble with the law is... well never. I mean, I used to get parking tickets at SRU and a few times have gotten the letters saying that they never received payment. Then I would go to the campus police station and see what happened and they would tell me that they didn't process the ticket until after they had sent out the letter. Which means that I had paid, they didn't change the status on the computers and then they would send a letter saying that I hadn't paid.

I think I'm going to start riding a bike everywhere so I don't have to put with all of this crap. Can you get parking tickets for a bike?

If anyone has ever fought a parking ticket or anything like this please let me know about your experience and what you think I should do, because I don't know if the hassle of going to court to plead not guilty is worth saving a whole $47.50, when I would lose that just by not working the day I'd have to take off to go.

Blah, maybe I should take out a collection to pay the punks off from the lovely city of Meadville...

haha!!!