$500 in parking tickets. Almost every
ticket I received was during class hours and was due to a lack of spaces. My choices were to be late for class and wait for a spot to open or to park illegally and pray I didn't get a ticket. I asked Parking Management on several occassions where the best place to park was, and they rarely had a good answer. Most often they would just shake their heads, not knowing themselves. Recently I was rejected on an appeal, for a ticket I received for parking on some dirt behind south campus. I had spent twenty minutes trying to find a spot, and finally I had to go to class. My plea was rejected, and so I have devised a way to damage the administration that has taken so much from me.
Parking Management has admitted to over-issuing parking decals with respect to available spots. Why has there been no break for students? My understanding was that we were here to go to school. Twenty-dollar fines for every infraction leave many of us stressing more over available parking and possible fines then on the coming lecture or test we drove to school to attend.
Why is there no leniency? Parking fines have been doubled and are used as as a cash machine for the university. The school refuses to release the dollar amount of all revenues from parking tickets a day. Campus Police told me they issue about 40-60 parking tickets a day. Based on this number, the university has made at least $800 a day on parking tickets, and that is just assuming that there were 40 tickets issued, all for the lowest $20 violations. With about 105 days in a semester, that comes to $80,500. That is just one semester. This amount does not make up all the revenue. There are about 5,000 decals issued each year at $60 each. Three hundred thousand dollars a year is collected just in vehicle registration fees.
Recently, in a communications class, my professor told the students how he had gotten even with his alma mater. On his graduation day the school issued him a parking ticket and wouldn't let him graduate. He felt the charge was so absurd that he has never given a penny to his university.
At this point in my senior year I no longer feel helpless against Parking Management. In fact, it is quite a deal for me. I now have an excuse to withhold the money I would have given to the university. I have loved this school and would have given generously. But the lack of administrative attention and action devoted to this problem is inexcusable, and I cannot in good conscience support such apathy. I estimate my total gifts to the university over my lifetime could have totaled $5,000 at a minimum. The university will never see that money. It is not that I don't have a philanthropic heart. My father is involved with the university fund raising and has encouraged me not to write this column. Unfortunately the school has given me no choice. If the members of the administration think that students don't have any power in decision making, maybe this action will change their minds.