It wouldn’t be necessary to break the meter; simply blocking the signal would suffice. A couple of hundred people doing this randomly (in a town of 200,000 people) would do it.
You could tie up the bureaucrats with a staff just to fix that.
The problem of course, is that they’re spending your money to fix something you don’t even want.
Blocking the signal would be a real shame too. Really sad when the peasants refuse to concede to their betters. Buncha uppity rebels ...