Hey Laura May. How was your day? Was it okay?

Oshkosh, Wisconsin is famous, sort of.
We hold the world's biggest aircraft convention every year (EAA)
We are the namesake to the famous kids clothing company, OshKosh B'Gosh.
and we have the most police per capita of any US city!<--this is a rumor, but if you lived here you would probably think it is true.

I've been living in Oshkosh for most of my life. Yeah, we have a few defining features such as a very recognizable name but Oshkosh is very much the average mid-western town. Yes, Oshkosh too suffers from a lack of social diversity in race, wealth and political ideology. We have a Walmart, several chain restaurants, a small downtown economy. But deep within the heart of Oshkosh, the city holds a secret that makes us very different from many average mid-western towns.

A message to tourist: If you come to Oshkosh, don't take the road less traveled. Because if you take the road less traveled most likely you will hit a pothole. or several.

A former aquaintance once told me about his uncle who was a former city official of Platteville. I think the uncle was the former city planner or manager or something. All I remember from this distant conversation is the person telling me about how his uncle was discusted with the condition of the streets of Oshkosh and how they are probably the worst he had ever seen in a city our size. (Oshkosh is over 60,000 people).

I live in downtown Oshkosh and unfortunately I have to pay the city each month to park in the parking lot near my apartment. One day, when I was paying for my parking tickets at city hall I asked the cashier about just where the revenue from the parking tickets goes to. She told me the money went towards upkeep of city parking lots and streets. HAH!! Oshkosh has some of the worst streets I've very seen in a city our size. I once knocked out hte exhaust on my car driving over a crater sized pothole near UW-Oshkosh. Oshkosh also seems to have some of the most strict parking restrictions for our size. Now, I know that in bigger cities like Madison, parking is obviously more expensive and strict, but I see this as being a reflection of its much larger population.

Downtown Oshkosh is not the land of booming businesses yet the parking is VERY strict. The parking lot near the convention centre, I would estimate is empty about 80 percent of the year yet most of the parking spaces have meters on them. The whole city of Oshkosh has an ordinance that cars can not park on city streets between the hours of 2 am and 5 am EVEN in the summer. The city of Oshkosh collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from parking tickets each year. Yes, this is undoubtedly an estimation but if you go to the city hall cashier's office you'll see a stack of hundreds of parking tickets waiting to be tabulated. Considering most parking tickets are $10 each, well you can do the math. So I guess my main question lies, If Oshkosh maintains such a strict parking ordinance..... the city must be collecting a large revenue from parking tickets.

Since Oshkosh so many streets in poor condition WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING?


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