Kalona cracks down on parking violations

The city of Kalona saw 12 parking citations in under 30 hours between Feb. 7 and 9, part of an effort requested by some citizens at recent city council meetings.

“There’s been some community complaints on parking,” City Administrator Ryan Schlabaugh said. “The council has asked for some increased visibility from our law enforcement from the Washington County sheriff’s office and also to look at what that enforcement looks like.”

While the city has not reviewed the data yet, Schlabaugh said he suspected many of the violations came from no parking areas and improper parallel parking.

“It might be an overnight in our downtown, or those areas that cause the greatest concern when we have severe weather events,” he said. “A large one that we’ve seen here recently (is) people parking against traffic, which is against the ordinance. You need to park adjacent to the curb with traffic, and that’s one that is easily rectified with education.”

Schlabaugh said the city was considering the addition of some new areas to its no parking ordinance. One of those areas is F Avenue, near the middle school.

"From Sixth to 10th, the council is discussing doing some no parking on that street,“ he said. ”We did have, at our last meeting, some residents from F come and voice some concerns, some comments, so we’re working with the school district on how that might look. A large portion of it is to accommodate bus traffic and where people pick up.“

The city is considering a few other locations as well.

“We’re looking at Fifth Street from C Avenue to D Avenue, by our post office and fire station, to include that in the downtown no parking … from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” Schlabaugh said. “The last one is Harvest Hill, our subdivision just west of Highway 1, to have no parking on the east side due to street width and the amount of off-street parking that’s available.”

As for the current tickets, Schlabaugh said they weren’t limited to a specific part of town.

“It’s more just changing peoples’ habits for how they may have parked for some time,” he said. “There’s no one particular area in town … there’s some here and some there, and I think that’s kind of what law enforcement found, they’re kind of all over and they took a hard look at our community.”

Washington County Sheriff Jared Schneider said the upped attention to parking was a matter of informing the public.

“It’s an ongoing thing, we’ll continue to have conversations with the city of Kalona and see how they want us to proceed,” he said. “Hopefully with some education, we can work with the residents and get some of those issues corrected.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com