We shouldn’t have to move our cars to get our leaves collected

This year, the city of La Crosse vows to get it right when it comes to collecting fallen leaves. The city each year sends vacuum trucks through our neighborhoods to suck up the leaves which we place on our boulevards. But it isn’t always effective. Last year the city got a late start on the collection, and then the snow came. Those piles of leaves were quickly encased in snow and ice, so the city stopped its collection efforts. Realizing there has to be a better way, the city adopted a longer collection schedule, along with plans to recruit more city workers to help with the effort. Now the city says it wants a four week collection schedule, and still plans to use employees of the MTU, wastewater and parks departments to lend a hand. But they also may make us move our cars every night. The city is considering adopting and enforcing a 24 hour alternate side parking system throughout the leaf collection efforts. That makes no sense, and may cause more problems than it solves. The failure to collect leaves in a timely fashion has nothing to do with cars in the way. Those hoses can work around them. And what are we to do if we can’t park on one side of the street in a 2 hour parking zone? We only have one side of the street to legally park, but still have to move our cars every two hours? That could get exhausting. It seems the idea of essentially extending the alternate side parking law by a month is more about generating parking revenue than clearing our boulevards of leaves.