We agree with board member Suzette Kragenbrink – making a new parking lot and not addressing a chokepoint leading to that lot and through street is only going to compound the traffic issues for Mount Vernon, not ease them.

Yes, we haven’t seen the new additional parking lane in use near the Mount Vernon Middle School yet, nor the new bus lane. And yes, we haven’t seen the final bids on the project.

But traffic during peak hours of 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. and 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. are one of the issues the Mount Vernon School system was looking to address.

We know as superintendent Matt Leeman said at June’s meeting, this may not be the only thing the district does to address traffic. That there may need to be another road outlet/inlet to the school system at another point in the future. This parking lot project was one way proposed to diagnose the issue.

But Kragenbrink is correct on the impassibility of that road with cars parked along the south lane. That road is not usable as a two lane road when that happens, and it happens very often.

Traffic, especially when school is in session, is an ongoing issue.

We get board member Jeremy Kunz’s stance on not impacting the other project the district is looking to tackle yet this fall, the middle school exterior.

We also agree with Leeman that the district has funding streams to tackle this additional improvement to the project. Between one-time monies from a rollover from a no longer used account, to interest generated on the bonds for the middle school project, if bids come in competitively on the project, it makes fiscal sense. And even with bids, the district doesn’t have to accept them if they come in too high.

We know this will likely mean the parking lot project may stretch further into the spring, but the choice was something like this or enforcing no parking signs on both stretches of Seventh Avenue instead and then enforcing that.