La Crosse wisely postpones more downtown road work

Give them enough chances, and eventually City Hall will get it right. The city has postponed its plans to do some road work on Third Street in downtown La Crosse. Some road repairs were scheduled to begin Monday on Third Street, from State Street to Cass Street. The road was to be down to one lane starting Monday morning, but just before the road work was to begin, the city announced it was postponing the plans for the work until further notice. Our newsroom checked into the mysterious postponement, and it turns out the city wised up after road work on another part of Third Street a week earlier. At that time, Third Street was down to one lane from La Crosse Street to State Street. And as anyone who was trying to head south into La Crosse on the morning or afternoon commute can tell you, it was slow going at best. Traffic was backed up from downtown all the way to the viaduct. Wisely, the city finally realized that was again going to be the outcome if it again blocked off a lane of Third, so they tell us that remaining work on Third Street will be delayed until after Second Street is reopened, a portion of which is currently closed to accommodate work on the old Machine Products building. It would have been helpful if the city had come to this realization sooner, and made a decision earlier so they didn’t change plans last minute. But in the end they did get it right. It’s like Winston Churchill said, you can depend upon America to do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted every other possibility.