More trouble with La Crosse’s downtown ramps

Gates went up, parking machines are down

The “ticket-gate” saga continues in La Crosse’s downtown parking ramps.

Five months after taking the gates down because of vandalism, the city reinstalled those gates Monday. On Wednesday, word was the ticket machines themselves are now having problems.

One appears to be with the software that’s supposed to keep count of the cars inside the ramp. Parking utility coordinator Jim Flottmeyer doesn’t know if they actually work.

“The counters in the machines have basically never been used,” Flottmeyer told the city parking board Wednesday.

He also told the board he needs a couple months to study usage patterns in the ramps to determine when it’s considered full, and he wants to err on the side of caution.

“I don’t want to be called worse names than the czar,” Flottmeyer said, referring to his nickname, The Parking Czar. “That’s what I’m looking for. I just want to make sure we’re doing it and doing it right.”

That time frame strikes some members of the city parking board as too long to wait. The board is asking Flottmeyer to come back with some data at the August meeting.

“I want to be able to make sure that, every day, as those counters work,” Flottmeyer said, “that we’re not overselling because there’s too many transient parkers in there and then the lease holders don’t have a place to park.”