City looking at plate readers to make ticketing more efficient in parking ramps

Parking gate system cost city $450,000.

The city of La Crosse is looking to upgrade technology to make it easier to track those in the parking ramps.

Parking utility coordinator Jim Flottmeyer is hoping it make it easier on the police dept. to ticket those in the ramps with devices that will track through license plates.

“The enforcement officers can just drive by,” Flottmeyer said. “They won’t have to chalk tires anymore. The license plate recognition will pick up their plates as they drive by. As they drive back through, it’ll tell them how long they’ve been sitting at that spot.”

The gated system brought in about three years ago that the city uses now cost $450,000. Flottmeyer didn’t say how much a license plate tracking system would cost but it would be efficient.

“It’s helping the parking utility and the police dept. to be more efficient on the back side, and more customer efficient on the front side in helping them to be able to pay their citations faster and easier,” he said.

So far this year, the city has taken down the parking gates to figure out how to remedy vandalism – people either destroying the gates or vehicles driving through them without paying. After five months, that remedy was to switch to pine wood gates, raise prices to $1 an hour and turn the gate system back on.

During that process, Flottmeyer was also hired as parking utility coordinator.

The city brought in $10,052 from the parking ramp gates in November and $80,995 for the year, excluding December. In parking violations, the city brought in $59,000 for November – most of that from the 3,800 alternate-side parking tickets.