City Hall Early Voting Opens Monday; Downtown Navigation Hazard Officially Elevated To 'Significant'

WAUKESHA — Early voting for the fall municipal election opens Monday at City Hall, 201 Delafield Street, and will run weekdays through Friday, Aug. 7, the City Clerk's office confirmed this week. In the same announcement, the office noted that the building's entrance has been the subject of what it called "elevated navigational difficulty" among first-time visitors, and said additional signage would be staged outside ahead of Monday's opening.

According to an internal memo obtained by this newspaper, the clerk's office is now tracking an average of 2.8 passes by the building per first-time voter before the correct entrance is located, up from an informal estimate of "roughly two" cited in years past. The memo attributes the increase to what it terms "cumulative grid unfamiliarity" and recommends visitors budget an additional four minutes before their scheduled appointment.

"We've elevated it from moderate to significant," said one city planning official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the classification has not yet been formally adopted by the full council. "Moderate was when people found it eventually. Significant is when we start handing out flyers."

The Grid

City Hall sits one block off the downtown one-way grid, a network of streets including Broadway and St. Paul Avenue that reverses direction from block to block with no posted logic that any current employee has been able to identify. Voters approaching from the west side are advised in the clerk's office guidance to treat their first pass as reconnaissance rather than an actual attempt to park.

Bob Krueger, 72, a retired city Department of Public Works supervisor, said he was not surprised by the 2.8 figure and considered it, if anything, optimistic. "I worked forty-one years two blocks from that building," Krueger said. "I still take St. Paul the wrong way about once a quarter, purely out of habit, and I know it's the wrong way while I'm doing it."

"Somebody's going to vote absentee just to avoid the parking lot. I'd almost respect that."

— Bob Krueger, retired DPW supervisor

Councilman Gary Puchalski said the city considered a temporary satellite voting location this cycle but ultimately decided against it. "We looked at it," Puchalski said. "The consensus was that moving early voting somewhere easier to find would not address the underlying issue, which is the grid, and would also require us to admit the grid is the issue."

What To Expect Monday

The clerk's office said early voting hours will run 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays through Aug. 7, with an extended session until 7 p.m. on the final Tuesday. Voters are asked to bring a valid photo ID and, per the memo, "reasonable expectations about the entrance."

Signage staged for Monday includes two sandwich boards at the Delafield Street corner and a laminated sheet taped inside the lobby's inner door directing latecomers back outside to the correct one. The clerk's office said it considered a third sandwich board for the alley side of the building but decided the alley was "not really meant for anybody to be back there in the first place."

One city planning official, asked whether a more permanent fix was under consideration, suggested opening a satellite voting location "literally anywhere else." The suggestion was not adopted for this election cycle. The clerk's office said it would revisit the entrance question, as it has in prior years, "after this one is over."