Car boots likely on the way in La Crosse to help with parking ticket collections

La Crosse is poised to adopt new state rules allowing booting and towing of cars for unpaid parking fines.

“You will see an ordinance coming through, probably this summer, authorizing the city, actually the adopting that as state law,” La Crosse assistant chief Rob Abraham said. “So, we are looking at that.”

The boots would be for the exceptional cases of those who accumulate and don’t pay off parking tickets. Abraham says don’t press your luck by letting them go unpaid.

“That’s probably going to be a bad idea, because you’re going to come out and find a boot on your vehicle or we’ll have the ability to tow it and impound it until you pay the citations,” he said.

The city currently has about a half million dollars in overdue parking tickets it’s trying to collect on.

The boots would be for, “habitual parking violators, as the state has termed them,” Abraham said. “And that is, you have accumulated five or six citations and they’re more than 60 days past due, so basically, accumulating tickets and just ignoring them.”

Abraham says to free your car you would have to pay for the old parking tickets, as well as cover costs for the boot, towing, storage and an administrative fee — the amount of which has yet to be determined.