Campus Safety employees have put a strong emphasis on parking rules and regulations in an effort to solve parking problems for all.
Third year psychology student Davon Reams thinks that the parking upgrades this year have made a significant impact on him.
“Last year, I got multiple tickets for being parked in wrong spots, because all of the spots I was supposed to park in were taken up by students who were not supposed to be parked there. With the new changes this year, I haven’t gotten a single ticket and feel like the problem has gotten a lot better,” Reams said.
Francis Hacken, Director of Campus Safety, said the university community faced serious parking woes with the lack of spaces throughout campus lots.
“Basically, in 2024 last year, we saw a very strong issue with the lack of parking, and a lot of it was because of the increase in the first-year students.”
Second year commuting student Erica Moyer said there were no parking spots last year when she would arrive to school as a freshman early in the morning.
“Last year, when I used to commute to school, I would arrive around 7:30 for my class, and it would always take me at least 15 to 20 minutes to find a parking spot.”
To fix this problem, Hacken and Camus Safety have designated a parking lot for all first-year students at the lower end of campus at Passan Hall. This makes room for more spots for commuters, upperclassmen, and faculty to park in upper campus lots.
“We do not have enough parking on upper campus for everyone, but when you look at lower campus, there were more than 120 available parking spots last year that weren’t being utilized. With fairness, the freshmen should be the ones, within a reasonable amount of people, to be moved down to Passan,” Hacken said.
Staffers knew there were not going to be enough parking spots for all of the first-year students, so they added extra parking spots on upper campus, as well as behind the Anderson building.
“We wanted to be as fair as possible to the freshmen, so we looked at everything and added parking behind Anderson and added more parking to the first-year students at upper campus,” Hacken said.
It may seem like first-year students have the short end of the stick in this situation, but Hacken ensures that all freshmen picked to park at Passan were “randomized.”
“When we had the list of first-year students who were going to be having a vehicle on campus, the IT department created a computer program so students who were selected to park at Passan was done on a random programmer,” Hacken said.
Campus Safety has also instituted a new parking decal system for cars to make sure students are parking where they are supposed to be, and to see which students have paid their parking fees. Students who do not abide by these rules will receive tickets.
“If you have a car, and the person over here has a car, you’re paying and they’re not, they are circumventing the system, and that is not fair. So therefore, we had to do enforcement to determine if there were students who were not paying their parking fee, identify them and then issue violations against them, and that’s what we did, and by doing that, we created an environment to make students get their parking decals,” Hacken said.
To enforce the rules for all students, Campus Safety has been working with Campus Life to incorporate further discipline with Callie Mack, the Dean of Students. If parking tickets start to pile up against a student, they will seek further enforcement from the Dean.
“There is student discipline now if you continuously violate the parking regulations. Prior to this you got a ticket, and sometimes you know your parents will pay for that, and students do not feel the outcome of the violation. Now the Dean has the authority to use her resources to help the parking enforcement.”
Earlier in the semester, Campus Safety did a decal check as students entered campus in their cars so they could identify which students did not have them.
“About two weeks ago, we did a traffic check point, and we tried to identify which students did not have a decal so that we could get their information so we could ensure they got one,” Hacken said.
Reams says that he will not commit any parking violations this year.
“Last year I got about six or seven parking tickets. The money was one thing, but now that you can get in trouble with the school for it, they won’t be catching me committing and parking violations anytime soon,” Reams said.
According to Hacken, one student has seven parking infractions already.
“They were supposed to be parking in lower campus, and they were parking in upper campus. That is being referred to the Dean of Students,” Hacken said.