More parking coming soon
Students will have access to 612 more parking spaces will be available at USU when a new four-level parking terrace opens in coming weeks, but they aren’t coming without a cost.
In a presentation to students in a USU class this past week, Parking and Transportation Department Director Lisa Leishman said the parking structure, which is located under the newly-constructed Living and Learning Center near Old Main Hill, cost $7.5 million to build. To pay for this structure will require yearly payments of $400,000, which has resulted in higher costs for all campus parking, including the cost of a general “B” permit, which doubled in price in 2004, Leishman said.
Leishman said she regrets the rising cost of parking on campus, but the new terrace was built and now it needs to be paid for. Building a parking terrace such as this one costs more than 12 times as much as building a regular surface lot, she said.
“We, as a department, don’t support parking structures because they cost so much, but we will go along with it if that’s what our constituents want,” she said.
Of the 612 parking spaces in the terrace – which will be named Aggie Terrace – 300 will be reserved for residents of the Living and Learning Center, 100 will be reserved for faculty and staff and 100 will be reserved for commuter students, Leishman said. The remaining spots will be available for people to use and they pay as they leave, similar to the Big Blue Parking Terrace north of the Taggart Student Center, she said.
None of the funding for parking comes from tuition or fees, so all costs for lot maintenance, construction and parking personnel must be covered by revenue generated by charging people to park on campus, Leishman said. The Big Blue Terrace has a yearly cost of $35,000 – a cost which has always been sufficiently covered by the revenue it generates. Because the new terrace costs more than 11 times as much, it won’t be able to generate enough revenue to cover the costs, which leads to the increase in all parking costs across campus, she said.
“Everyone who parks on campus must pay, because there’s no such thing as free parking,” Leishman said.
Leishman also told students about the results of a recent peer review of the parking system done by parking officials from Washington State University. At the recommendation of the reviewers, parking officials recently purchased new software that will allow students to purchase parking passes and pay for parking citations online, possibly beginning fall semester 2007, she said.