Courthouse Parking Lot is Messed Up
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Going to Juvenile Court is often a stressful experience.
Parking at the Juvenile Courthouse should not add to that stress, but lately it has been doing just that.
According to Central Parking officials, on January 8th, 2 older parking terminals were removed from lot E and replaced with a single, more modern unit.
According to citizens coming to the court, the new solar powered unit has never worked well, and because of that, lines are long and people are frequently late to court.
Messed Up goes to parking lot E on Wednesday 1/20/10 around 12:30 pm, ½ an hour before the afternoon court docket is scheduled to begin.
There are approximately a dozen people in line, all of whom saythe machine is malfunctioning.
Though it says it will accept cash, the machine is not accepting dollar bills. The red light is on and it indicates it will only take credit cards, which is a longer authorization process.
Several people in line don’t have credit cards, so people with cash end up cutting deals with people with credit cards to pay for their tickets.
As one nice woman with a credit card tells Messed Up, “I shouldn’t have to take money from someone to pay for their parking.”
Another man tells me his concern is that the new terminal requires you to know your license tag number. If you don’t know your license number, he says you have to stop your transaction, get out of line, go to your car and get back in line and wait all over again.
One woman with a small child tells us that court is stressful enough and the headache of worrying about paying for a parking space and being late to court is unnecessary.
Sources inside the court house tell messed up lawyers have been complaining for weeks, even calling from the parking lot to tell the court they were running 30 minutes late.
I go to the Central Parking office on Church Street where VP and General Manager Richard Wagner addresses the issue.
To his credit, Wagner says he immediately dispatched a crew to the machine, which he says was malfunctioning.
“When we did the installation, we replaced two older machines, called Lexus; they were failing, so we put in digital equipment in its place. To be candid the credit card receiver was not working properly, when we first installed it on January 8th. We were quickly trying to install it since the other machines were failing. Unfortunately that machine was not totally ready to go out.”
He tells me that the credit card mode was not set properly to begin with which is why authorization times were taking so long.
Thanks to our call, he says that was corrected.
As for the money not being accepted, Wagner says the company believes it is a humidity issue.
“The bill accepters are susceptible to humidity and we had failures. We corrected it and now we are working on how to reduce the humidity problem. W are going to try “stay dry” internally with the equipment and we’ll put up a shelter to shield the equipment from rainfall. We want a smooth transaction that takes a few seconds, for people to do their business.”
Wagner agrees with citizens complaining about the lack of signage on the lot regarding license plate info, and he says that will be addressed immediately.
I was there, and the parking payment machine was messed up. I was one of the lucky people who had a credit card, and could help the people without them… Oddly enough, the experieece we had in court was more messed up than the parking lot.