Mayor’s Column June 21, 2025
Rohn Bishop, Mayor of Waupun
Hello Waupun!
On Monday I signed paperwork to officially purchase the white block building located behind Brook’s Shoes. Later this Summer we will be tearing down the building to make way for more and safer parking. This is the first step towards our downtown alley improvement project. Next, we’re going to try and bury the overhead utility lines and remove the poles. Then we’re going to likely make that alley a one way with more angled parking. This project is meant to clean up the alley, make it more aesthetically pleasing, create more parking spaces, and to make it safer to navigate.
As a city, we’re also actively looking for locations to expand municipal parking in the central business district. As our downtown area continues to thrive, parking, or lack thereof has become a problem… a good problem to have, but a problem we wish to address, nonetheless.
I’m often asked why the on-street parking downtown is 2- or 3-hour parking, and the answer is to discourage someone from parking a car in front of a business for an entire day. The goal of parking time limits is to encourage turnover and support the businesses. This ensures that parking spaces are available for a variety of customers, rather than being occupied by the same vehicles for extended periods. If you have business to take care of that will last longer than a couple of hours, the municipal lots allow all day parking. The municipal lots are located behind the businesses on both sides of Main Street.
This same logic is why we’ll no longer be allowing food trucks to be parked on Main Street. A food truck can tie up a couple of spaces for several hours. Food trucks are allowed to be on private property, or the yet to be named open space that was designated largely to host food trucks.
Speaking of the downtown open space, we’re looking for name ideas. While many of us have defaulted to calling it the “Food Truck Alley” the space is very versatile. An example is this past winter, the Our Bar used that space to host a fundraiser/benefit. It can host live music, and it’s the location where we display our community Christmas Tree every year. As for what to name it, we’re thinking of naming it for a prominent Waupunite, or somehow tie in the fact that that location historically was a hardware store for a very long time. Anyway, if you have any ideas, let me know!
Thank you and God Bless
Mayor Rohn
