Parking Issue Straightened Out: Milwaukee Department of Public Works officials defended the LUKE parking meters at a meeting last week in City Hall and in a letter sent to OnMilwaukee.com.

Dorinda Floyd, the city parking administrator, said that, overall, the LUKE machines work, despite complaints aldermen received regarding problems with receipt printing, the ability to see the screens on the machines, frozen keypads and confusion over parking stalls.

"We believe it's very successful but there have been some challenges," Floyd told the Public Works Committee.

She said there are about 20,000 transactions during the week on the meters and that the public likes the credit card feature, using it some 45 percent of the time. It's also a real time transaction, which sends money automatically to the city. "(Credit card use) has exceeded our expectations," she said.

Regarding receipt printing issues, Floyd said that option was wanted by the public, even though in an Oct. 16 response to a vendor bidding on the meters, the answer was, "The printer is optional. However, if a printer is included in the unit, a transaction should be able to be completed without a receipt being completed ... in the event of a jam or other printer malfunction."

Answering questions regarding glare that makes it difficult to read the machines' screens, Floyd told the committee and this column, "We are exploring options to correct this problem."

Because some of the screens failed during a recent cold spell and that they take some time to warm up when waking up from "sleep mode," the city parking office has decided to leave them turned on all the time.

As for contentions that the original bid required solar panels, about which at least two vendors have complained, suggesting that somehow the bid was changed, Floyd told the committee and this column that the bidding guidelines noted that solar was an "and / or" option and told the committee, "recharging off of lights poles wasn't in the specifications, it's something we decided to go to," she told the committee.

She added in a letter to this column that the city saved some $55,000 by not using solar panels for the 103 LUKE meters and that the power will cost about $1,000 a year to charge batteries in the meters.

In other points in her e-mail to this column, Floyd contends:

• * "In your article you state 'after some modifications to the proposal, the city chose Digital Payment Technologies.' Typically, in an RFP process addendums are issued to clarify provisions or to correct errors or omissions. Five addendums were issued for this RFP."
• "In your article you alleged that 'one vendor filed a formal complaint to the city about its process, especially since at the time it was the only bidder on the project.' The city received six proposals of which four were selected as finalists. Further, we are not aware of any formal complaint filed. We received some emails and letters from vendors after the winning vendor was announced and we responded to their questions accordingly.'

In a complaint dated Oct. 16, 2006 to the city's waste, fraud and abuse hotline that "one vendor," TAPCO, complained that the bidding guidelines were so specific as to favor one company, accusing the DPW of "slanting" the bid with "proprietary specifications." The complaint also noted that the bid required no performance bond to protect the city in case the things didn't work, "highly unusual with so much money on the line," it reads, "why would the city do such a thing?"