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A better product

City makes strides with parking ramp operations

Jill Schramm/MDN The Renaissance parking ramp is shown Tuesday.

The City of Minot is taking steps to reduce calls for assistance to its parking ramps and to speed the response when calls come in.

On Nov. 13, an incident occurred in which a person was trapped in the Renaissance ramp for an hour and a half while waiting for an emergency responder to release the barrier arm. The barrier had not raised when the person inserted her pass because the time period covered by the pass had been exceeded.

Finance Director David Lakefield told the Minot City Council at its committee meeting Wednesday that since then, the city has worked with the equipment supplier to make adjustments so over-extending one’s pass won’t lock a person in the ramp. However, information will be recorded. If the city sees a pattern of over-extending a pass, the owner can be contacted and encouraged to revise the pass terms.

“We have improved our processes,” Lakefield said. “All of the police and fire vehicles have access to the gate cabinets at the ramps. They have laminated cards with some of the instructions on how to clear the errors or open the gates.”

Dispatchers at the police department also now are able to remotely log into the operating software for the ramps.

“In a lot of cases, if they have a call for assistance, they are able to open those arms from the dispatch center without actually having to send someone out. That doesn’t always work in every case, but we’ve had been able to use that here recently in a couple of instances,” Lakefield said.

Dispatchers and others who take calls are recording more information from callers to help the city in troubleshooting problems, he added.

“It looks like the overwhelming cause of some of these issues is essentially operator error,” he said, listing over-staying a pass as among those errors.

Lakefield said police recorded about 17 public calls for assistance in getting in or out of the ramps since May 1. The bulk of the 186 calls to the two ramps over the six months involved extra patrol, with the remainder being traffic incidents or, in one instance, a moose in the ramp.

Lakefield said the city also is establishing a routine maintenance schedule for the equipment and is looking at acquiring standby equipment that can be used when any equipment at the ramps is down for repairs or replacement.

The city plans to install a camera system for surveillance that will provide security and help identify equipment problems, he said.

“We have taken a number of steps to improve this. We continue to work to improve this. I think we have made great strides in cleaning these ramps up and, hopefully, we will continue to move forward and make this even a better product,” he said.

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