La Crosse sets specific hours for City Hall to be open

La Crosse’s City Hall is joining the list of public buildings opting for greater security.

A new building policy calls for the main doors at City Hall to be locked at 5 p.m. on weeknights and reopened at 7:30 a.m. unless there are city meetings planned on a specific night.

Park department spokesman Jay Odegaard says a general desire for increased security among city departments led to the locked-door order.

“We really needed to make sure we had City Hall secured to the point where we could definitely understand and be knowledgable about who was in the building,” he said.

Odegaard says the City Hall doors often have been kept open later than 5 p.m. on non-meeting nights, when custodians were working late.

Members of one city-appointed committee found themselves locked out of City Hall this week, when they showed up for a meeting scheduled at 5:30 p.m. Odegaard said the meeting date had been changed on short notice, and the change was not registered on official city schedules.