The Janesville ordinance for overnight parking at the north Traxler Park boat launch was set to end on October 31, but now homeless families will have a new designated parking area.
The city council voted Monday night to extend the ordinance to March 31, 2020 but change the location to the municipal parking lot on 105 North Jackson Street, just across from the police station.
By city ordinance, the change is effective immediately, but it won’t be in practice until the city transfers over the necessary equipment for signage and security monitoring.
More than a dozen residents and business owners from the neighborhood around north Traxler Park came to the public hearing to express their concerns over the overnight parking.
Neighbors referenced theft, drug use and prostitution in the parking lot, but Janesville police found no evidence of any crimes other than one incident where officers arrested the owner of a vehicle registered in Colorado who damaged two of the surveillance cameras that monitor the parking lot 24 hours a day.
Police said the owner of a recreational vehicle had been camping at the park full time, but she moved her vehicle earlier this month and has not returned since officers threatened to issue a citation.
A representative from Wisconsin River Bank, which is adjacent to the park on North Parker Drive, expressed safety concerns about strangers coming and going from the park and staying too long into the morning. When a WCLO reporter spoke to that same Wisconsin River Bank employee in September, the representative said they had no issues with the overnight parking.
The concerned citizens expressed a desire to help the homeless but felt the location at north Traxler Park was not the right place. They brought forward the suggestion to move the parking to the Jackson Street lot.
Janesville police recorded 31 different vehicles using the overnight parking program over the first 72 days of the ordinance, with an average of 3.7 vehicles per night.
ECHO Associate Director Jessica Locher said her organization’s outreach team visited the parking lot a minimum of two nights each week to connect the homeless with services in the community. They found that over two-thirds of the vehicles using the parking lot were “new homeless individuals” and most were Janesville residents.
The new parking lot location does not have access to running water, but the city plans to provide a treated portable toilet that won’t freeze during the winter. They planned similar accommodations for the north Traxler Park lot in lieu of winterizing the existing bathroom facilities.
