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PARKING STORM ON THE HORIZON

The Lake Geneva parking nightmare, for just about everyone and everything, except for Mayor Mayor and city finances…goes on in tortured pain.  Things are now so bad, what with the near permanence of the four dollar an hour parking rate on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, plus the added ‘small sword driven straight in the heart of your wallet’ fifty-dollar fine for being too early (your car is parked in a chargeable slot but you take too much time down the street to pay for the parking privilege) or too late (mere seconds will cost you fifty bucks, if you are local, or nothing if you are from Illinois and simply leave the area).

The city police and fire commission has convinced the city council to approve expensive body cameras for parking attendants, because of the much-increased altercation rate between angry parkers and those attendants. Nobody, but nobody, is talking about the increased risk that this move blatantly and right-in-your-face demonstrates.  If the attendants need body cams, then they sure as hell need training in self-defense, proper attire (like vests) to protect them, portable radio contact directly with the police department, and then some sort of weaponry in order to potentially save their own lives before called in help can reach them.  These are ‘carry conceal and open carry’ times in Wisconsin.

They also need training, permanent positions and uniforms that better identify them as officials of the city.  The fact that no one in city leadership at all wants to discuss this is part of the reason for this article.  If a parking attendant, henceforth, after the publishing of this article, gets hurt or killed due to an altercation with a parking violator then the city is henceforth placed on public notice that it was warned.  That it should have known better.  Body cameras are great, but the need for having the images transmitted back to the department being produced at an inquest, which usually takes place as a result of a dead body incident, rather than for every day or night complaint issuance.

The better solution to the whole thing is to remove the cause of these new incidents involving outrage and potential violence, and that’s to lower the fine amount dramatically and reconsider the hourly parking rate.  Please, part-time applicants and those currently serving in a role as a parking attendant, understand that you are truly traveling in harm’s way and, apparently, no other agency, other than the Geneva Shore Report, is going to inform you about the danger inherently being alluded to by purchasing body cams for you.  The police and fire commission members get it but the rest of city leadership and those below them in the ‘pecking order’ of authority do not.

These same body cams should be supplied by the kids who serve as the ‘enforcers’ of so many rather innocuous ‘rules of the sea’ applied by them to visitors traveling around the surface of Geneva Lake waters during the summer months.  The Water Safety Patrol employees and volunteers are subject to the same kind of community reaction that can occur when anyone, particularly a young part-timer, attempts to correct or cite a potentially inebriated citizen or visitor who doesn’t want to either hear about a violation much less pay the price for committing it.