Council dissolves parking board, while complaints about the La Crosse ramps continue

Police dept. plans to change how users pay for ramps … eventually.

The board that oversees downtown parking ramps in La Crosse is gone.

Thursday night, the city council has voted to eliminate the parking utility board. 

The police department has largely taken over management of the ramps. They’ve promised changes in how users pay to park in the ramps but the timeline for those changes is unclear.  

Security and maintenance of the ramps clearly has improved in the last year or so, but the ramps are still plagued by frequent problems with the automated parking gates.  

Even two of our news reporters had problems both getting in and out of the ramps Thursday. And stories continue to flood the WIZM phone lines about “parking-gate.”

“I can go to the car wash every week and it takes my $4 and the gate goes up. Every time,” one caller said during Thursday afternoon’s show. “So there must be a problem that somebody don’t understand.”

Another caller complained about getting trapped numerous times behind a malfunctioning gate when paying for parking by the hour. Her conclusion: a general lack of tech savvy in city hall.

“I notice when I went to La Crosse city hall, technology overall is limited,” she said. “I think it’s probably that they don’t understand the technology they’ve put into place.”

Over the last year or so, the ramps have been the subject of much conversation, from charging for parking in a different manner to hiring a parking utility coordinator to having the police run the ramps to taking the gates down to putting the gates back up to charing more for parking to making it easier to give tickets in the ramps.

Some of that can be found here.