When people around Gary Yanco need help, he is often the one to provide it. 

Before he joined the Parking Department for the City of Lynn, Massachusetts, he worked in a restaurant in the city’s downtown business district. When the executive chef quit one day, Yanco stepped in to fill the role. 

The COVID-19 pandemic forced him to reinvent himself. Soon after he began working as a parking enforcement officer, he realized that few of the city’s parking meters were operational. 

“If your meters aren’t on, you can’t enforce parking rules,” he says. 

So, Yanco took it upon himself to fix them. Nobody had asked him to do it, and he didn’t have any training, but that didn’t stop him. He taught himself through trial and error. 

Jessica Chiappini, who became the city’s parking director two years later, calls him “a jack of all trades” and “an awesome employee.” 

She says it’s in large part thanks to Yanco that the city has seen a near-tenfold increase in the number of its working parking meters. And the city’s revenue from parking enforcement has grown exponentially. 

As an invaluable member of the team, it is only fitting that Yanco was promoted to a supervisory position that the city created for him. 

For his service to his community, Yanco, a member of Local 193 (Council 93), is a winner of our union’s Never Quit Service Award. The award recognizes public service workers who go above and beyond the call of duty to make their communities better. 

Chiappini laments that parking enforcement officers are among the lowest-paid city employees. They are often “not valued” for their work and are “disrespected by the public on a daily basis,” Chiappini says. 

But they do much more than issue parking fines. Yanco volunteered to become trained in administering NARCAN, a nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose. Since then, he has saved several lives, including two this past summer for which he was recognized by the city. 

Yanco traces his drive to how he was raised: never to give up and never to turn away from someone who needs help. 

“If you can do something to help someone or make something better, then do it,” he says. “People often think that parking enforcement is all about giving parking tickets and giving people a hard time, but it’s not. It’s about helping people. I’m proud of the work we do.” 

Yanco wants to raise his three young daughters with the same values he grew up with. 

“I want them to be proud of their dad,” says Yanco, who this summer celebrated five years working for the city. “I look at them and I know someday they’re going to have jobs, and I want them to not just have a job, but to be happy with the jobs they choose, to be fulfilled.”