Parking and Transportation Services use ticket and permit revenue to improve campus
First-year student Aimee Sword hoped for the best on her first day at the University of Idaho — she didn’t expect perfection, but wanted a smooth start overall. She never expected to be out $25 before even making it to her first class.
Nathan Romans | Argonaut
A vehicle in the Mernard Law building parking lot sits parked with a ticket from UI Parking and Transportation Services.
“Well I was parked over by the (Student Recreation Center),” Sword said. “I didn’t know it was a pay-to-park, so I got a ticket.”
She wasn’t the only one. Sword said many students received parking tickets in the red and silver lots by the SRC in the early morning hours of the first day of school.
Shawna Bertlin, UI Parking and Transportation Services spokeswoman, said between Aug. 8 and Sept. 3 the department gave out 698 warnings and 338 parking citations. She said full enforcement of university parking lots begins the first day of school.
As a permit-holder, Sword said she didn’t know she couldn’t park in those areas, even with her silver parking sticker, and that she didn’t learn about the parking rules in her new student orientation a few days prior.
Instead of paying for the ticket, she applied for an appeal and hopes she won’t end up having to pay the $25 fine.
Who gets citations?
Todd Broadman, PTS manager, said there’s a misconception floating around campus that PTS likes to blanket tickets out evenly, and that enforcement staff members are “nit-picky” about how students and employees park on campus.
“There is a small percentage of parkers who represent a higher number of the citations,” he said. “The numbers we ran indicate that about 1 percent of our parkers generate about 10 percent of our citations.”
Broadman said the data shows that people who are usually ticketed are likely to get ticketed again.
It’s not just students that receive parking tickets — faculty and staff do, too.
Bertlin and Broadman both said they have received tickets in the past and can understand how frustrating citations are.
“Nobody likes to get a ticket,” Broadman said. “We’re not picking on just one particular group, these are fairly distributed.”
Drivers who receive multiple tickets and choose to not pay the fines get holds on their university accounts, which can keep students from enrolling in classes or graduating.
What are the options?
When it comes to permits and citations, Bertlin and Broadman said PTS understands that college students struggle with finances and may not be able to afford the permit they want.
“With the way that our structure is, we have ones that get you really close to campus. For example the red permit, and that may be an option for people who have that amount of money to spend,” Bertlin said. “That’s something where you personally decide, ‘this is my budget and this is what I can spend.'”
Blue permits costs students $64 a year, but according to PTS maps, the two blue parking lots are on the edge of campus, on opposite sides. There’s one located behind the Kibbie Dome and one located off Sweet Avenue near Deakin Street.
Compared to WSU permit prices, UI permit prices are reasonably low, Boardman said.
For students who can’t afford the permits they want, Bertlin suggests using alternative transportation like biking and public transportation.
Broadman said he’s tried to make the parking situation less burdensome in the past, but university officials have turned down the proposed ideas.
He said PTS tried to have a Christmas program, where during Christmas break students could turn in canned food to reduce the price of their citations. He said administrators denied the request because “it would be taking campus resources.”
“It gets political and the policy standpoint gets difficult,” he said.
Where does the money go?
According to information sent by Bertlin, in fiscal year 2014 the department earned $278,000 from fines and $948,000 from permits.
Last year only 15 percent of PTS’s revenue came from citations, while the other 85 percent came from other fees and revenue creators, Broadman said.
“It doesn’t really contribute a whole lot to our capital investments on campus,” Broadman said. “We don’t rely a lot on them. Not only is it a small percentage but the trend is that it’s a smaller percentage every year.”
The department uses its revenue to help meet campus parking and transportation needs. Over the last two summers, PTS used revenue to heavily repair cracks and holes in various parking lots.
Other projects that PTS is interested in doing include paving gravel parking lots and repainting lines on roads and crosswalks, along with fixing sidewalk gaps. Bertlin said PTS also recently installed new bike racks for students, staff and faculty near Renfrew Hall.
Danielle Wiley can be reached at [email protected]