Downtown ramp pay stations could be operational again

The La Crosse city parking utility may be able to charge for parking in downtown ramps again Wednesday.

The system for paying to park in the ramps has been offline for the last couple of days due to some software glitch that started Monday.

The city’s vendor for the system has been working to get it back online.

The glitch charged countless transient drivers for the first three hours of parking, which is supposed to be free.

It’s unclear how many drivers were overcharged. The city is accepting refund requests for the snafu.  

The utility did not, however, use its relatively new $5,000 message video boards to notify the public of the pay station failure.

Apparently those screens aren’t entirely hooked up yet.  

The failure was noticed at about the same time the parking utility was presenting its first-ever quarterly report in City Hall that shows paid parking permits and fees generated just over $900,000 for the utility by the end of the third quarter this year.

In the year before the new gateless parking system went active, revenue was about half that — $462,000 — through the same nine-month period.