Michele Crout returned to her car one day in December to find the lot that she had been parking in for a year for free had been turned to a permitted lot.
Crout, who works as the department manager for the University of Idaho Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, began parking on the street after this notice.
She isn’t alone in her change of habits. Dozens of other cars that used to fill the two triangular parking lots west of Patty’s Mexican Kitchen & Catering have dispersed since the change. Now, commuters are required to pay $50 a semester for a lot that once cost nothing.
The lots were managed by the University of Idaho as Blue lots in the 2000s before they were leased out to a private individual, James Stephens, in 2005. UI purchased the lots in 1990, said Gerard Billington, a UI Real Estate Officer.
Michele Crout | Courtesy
“There’s hardly anybody parking there … so I just park on the street for free,” said Linda Moser, administrative coordinator at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The change in parking at these two lots is the latest flashpoint in the discussion of parking availability in Moscow.
“If I can find free parking, I’m not going to pay for it if I don’t have to,” said Moser.
When the signs were posted, Crout initially thought she had missed something. Why was the free lot requiring a permit?
“Then I pulled out of the lot and I noticed there were signs that they were requiring permits … it just said that your car would be towed away if you didn’t have a permit,” she said. “So that was kind of shocking.”
The property manager who converted the lot to pay-to-park, Stephens, said he gave ample notice before the change. Stephens put the notice up in mid-December, before winter break, which he said gave adequate time for people to buy a permit or find another place to park.
“I’ve been letting them park for free,” Stephens said. “And we pay taxes on it. We maintain it. It’s now time for them to pay a little bit.”
He also noted that the $50 per semester lot is “considerably under the going rate for parking,” undercutting most of UI’s options. The key difference between Stephens’ permits and those from UI are that UI ones last a year, while Stephens’ last a semester.
The most inexpensive rates for daytime UI parking is $64 for Blue permit for a year, but those have been sold out since the end of the fall semester. The next cheapest option is a Red pass, which runs $172 for a year. During the semester, the permits are sold on a pro-rated, meaning they are discounted to reflect the remaining days in the academic year.
Campus parking
The UI Parking and Transportation Services (PTS) has a set goal of turning the UI campus into one in which “a personally owned vehicle is not needed for mobility needs,” said Rebecca Couch, PTS Director.
Alex Brizee | Argonaut
She said their focus on the priorities of campus parkers, which they learned from a survey fielded last year, is parking space availability and expanding alternative transportation options.
To help reach that goal, the university has entered into a deal with Gotcha e-bikes to provide 50 bikes to campus for a bike-share program. They hope to launch the project in April, Couch said.
The program is part of the university’s efforts to encourage alternative transportation on campus through projects such as Zimride, in which students can pool car trips. Zipcar, meanwhile, allows students to rent cars hourly.
A previous deal with another bike share company, Spin, fell through last summer after the company pulled out in an apparent move away from bicycles and toward electric scooters.
Couch said the first year of the Gotcha e-bike program will be a pilot phase, after which the university will decide if it will continue with the project long term.
“We know that if it’s going to be successful, it has to grow,” Couch said. “We know there will likely be a higher demand, and we’ll have to add more bikes.”
With the focus on alternative transportation and space availability, Couch said officials have maintained “conservative” parking utilization rates on campus parking lots. This leads to permits such as Orange and Blue — high in demand and low in supply — being sold out early. Orange permits sold out the Friday prior the start of the fall semester, and the Blue permits sold out at the start of the spring semester.
But even then, management of these lots is more complicated than selling limited permits. Through data gathered on campus parking, PTS found that Blue lots on the east side of campus experience high demand, around an 80 percent utilization rate, while Blue lots on the west side of campus experience moderate demand, ranging from 30 to 61 percent utilization.
Orange lots, while also with wide variance in utilization rates, are sold at even more conservative rates, with an overall utilization rate of 72 percent.
Purple lots, on the other hand, are “very highly utilized” and always have been, according to Couch. While lots on new Greek Row (Nez Perce Drive) are often available, she said spaces on old Greek (Elm Street) are few and far between, with the lots sitting at 99 percent utilization rates.
The two triangular lots
Stephens has owned a dirt lot to the west of Patty’s since 2005, in addition to leasing out the two triangular parking lots to the north.
He is currently working with the city of Moscow and his bank to develop the property. Stephens — guarded about his plans — declined to share more details while the project is in the works. He said he hopes to move forward on plans to develop the dirt lot in the next year.
Stephens said his decision to charge came after he received notice from the city about people parking in the dirt lot he owns. The letter, which The Argonaut obtained through a public records request, thanked Stephens for his “willingness to work with us to resolve this issue.”
Stephens entered into a 55-year lease on the property in 2005, but postponed the lease for several years, said Gerard Billington, a UI Real Estate Officer,
Stephens also owns the right to a strip of parking stalls along the northwest end of the triangular lots, which factored into the UI’s decision to lease him the lots, according to Billington.
“When we did the lease in 2005, those parking lots were not viewed as crucial,” he said. “They were fairly lightly used and they’re not part of the parking plan because we granted a long-term lease in 2005.”
Billington said before Stephens acquired the dirt lot, the university had rights to use the strip of parking stalls Stephens now owns. Because of this, Billington said the university chose to lease to Stephens.
“When the railroad sold the property to Stpehens and his partner, we didn’t have access to the entire parking area,” Billington said.
Until parking on the street becomes no longer an option, both Moser and Crout said they’ll continue parking there. Crout said she recently bought permits to park on campus, but she doesn’t plan on purchasing one again.
“I bought parking permits in the past to park on campus, but as the parking price gone up and been farther away from where I work, I’ve just reserved to street parking,” she said.
Moser said she may consider purchasing a permit for the lots if parking on the street becomes too crowded.
“If it starts getting so congested on the street that I can’t find a place to park and it’s affecting me to get to work late, I will pay the $50. It’s not some insurmountable amount,” she said. “But as long as I can easily find a place to park, I’m not going to pay.”
Kyle Pfannenstiel can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @pfannyyy.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Linda Moser, administrative coordinator at the Department of Cviil and Environmental Engineering.