Okay, I have to chime in here...Vandy's parking fees for faculty/staff are well over $200/year! So, smile! It could be worse...

Truth

JoJo wrote:

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 Would the faculty and staff want the business community to pay  higher income taxes to allow their lazy butts to walk only a few blocks?

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Crawl back under your rock. There are more interesting trolls around than you.

I agree. You should get what you pay for - a shuttle system would be helpful - most universities have them in the Midwest.

Hello . . .

This morning, in the August meeting of Staff Council, it was announced that
2004-05 University parking decals for Hattiesburg campus will expire and new
decals for 2005-06 will take effect on 15 Aug. The current permit, for 12
months, cost us about $24; the new parking permit will cost $50.00.

Your Staff Council has a representative on the Dept. of Parking Management
campus-wide committee. We understand from that rep. that this issue of
permit cost increase was never discussed by the Parking Management
Committee.

We understand that approval of this increase must go through IHL. They
consider these issues once a year -- obviously, it has already been approved
through IHL.

There was quite a bit of discussion on this topic this morning, and your
Staff Council approved two motions related to this increase. Motivating
this discussion was that many staff are the lowest paid employees on campus,
particularly in physical plant units. To hit them with a $50 deduct . . .
increased over 100% from the previous year . . . would work a hardship,
especially since there had been no prior notice of the increase. Also,
within the discussion was the fact that the Parking Management Committee,
supposedly functioning to handle Parking Management issues, never discussed
this increase. Staff Council passed two motions, (1) that parking permit
fees be prorated over a period of time, rather than coming out of one
paycheck; (2) it was asked that our admin. re-consider the increase and
leave it at the current rate. [I have paraphrased the wording of these
motions, so it may not be exactly stated as it will appear in our S-C
minutes.]

I am reporting this to you to make you aware of what will happen to us all
within eight working days. Please pass this information on to your
colleagues and any others on campus whom you know will be affected.

By way of clarification, the comment about a million dollars a SEMESTER in fines was at Southern Miss, not at Texas. Lord only knows how much they take in here!

It's not about parking spaces here. There are plenty of parking spaces on campus. It's just that students have the attitude that they should get to park where they want to. I have no problem paying $500/year if necessary to have a space in close proximity to my building since I spend way more than 40 hours/week here at work. Most students spend less than half time that on campus. If "zone parking" were enforced, nobody would point to parking as a problem. However, SFT has let this issue slide in the name of "customer service".

USM parking fees are ridiculously low.  My wife just left a school where it was $80 a month to park in the far away lot that required a shuttle ride to campus.  At my school, it is $1300!  Though commuters can get a 7am-3am parking pass for $670.  Full time faculty and staff options begin at $750 and go to $1620.  $50 is nothing; USM has simply been spoiled by low fees.

By the way, at least as of 2 years ago, parking fines cannot go into the transportation budget. They go into the general scholarship fund.  Increases in fees are the only thing that can go toward new parking lots, parking garages, etc.

staff supporter wrote:

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Yes, but what's the average annual salary at these schools -- especially staff salaries? You must keep those figures in mind as well!

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I don't know off the top of my head, but I can promise you that they are not 15 times higher than USM salaries.

This did make me curious so I did a very quick search on our web site.  I couldn't find average staff salaries, but I did find that we pay custodians $20k.  I did a cost of living calculator on the web and $20k here would be $13.4 in Hattiesburg.  I don't know what USM pays, but I see other schools in the southeast pay around $13-13.5k so I am going to assume that pay is not that different possibly better when you take cost of living into account (data: Tenn St: $13k; U Memp: 13.1k; Ark St: $13.5; U Miami: $13.1; Birm-Sou Coll: $13.5k; these are the lowest paid custodians for colleges in the nation as of 2001).

manova wrote:

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USM parking fees are ridiculously low.  My wife just left a school where it was $80 a month to park in the far away lot that required a shuttle ride to campus.  At my school, it is $1300!  Though commuters can get a 7am-3am parking pass for $670.  Full time faculty and staff options begin at $750 and go to $1620.  $50 is nothing; USM has simply been spoiled by low fees.

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I'd venture to guess that salaries were higher where you lived and the cost of living was also probably greater than in Mississippi.

Invictus wrote:

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truth4usm/AH wrote:
Okay, I have to chime in here...Vandy's parking fees for faculty/staff are well over $200/year! So, smile! It could be worse...


At what point is it simply cheaper to pay parking fines? (Or for that matter, to feed coins into a parking meter out on West End Avenue?)

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You guys know I didn't mean to underplay the effect that this increase would have on staff salaries at USM...I'm definitely in solidarity with those folks. I was just pointing out that, on the whole, USM's parking decal fees are low. And we do have parking garages at Vandy, so we do get some sort of return on our money.

And, Vic, I hate walking out to West End to feed coins in those parking meters, so I paid for the $200 parking decal like everyone else! (PS--How did you know that I work close to West End...did Judge Cooley's Risk Manager report back to you about that?).

Did anyone know that parking management has a new system which tracks how many times one is on campus in a semester? Apparently everytime you get a vistors pass they run your DL. They can tell you everytime you have been on campus and if it is more than 2 or 3 times a semester you are no longer considered a visistor and you have to buy a pass. I understand that students try to beat the system but it seems by running the SS # you would know pretty quickly whether they were a student or not. It seems like in our present situation we would be welcoming visitors not discouraging them. The person who told me was a perspective grad student who had done the right thing by getting a visitors pass and had legitimate campus business that had her on campus several times in a two week period. Once she realized why they wanted to see her DL ( after she was questioned by the guard) she decided to take her tuition dollars to WCC where there is plenty of parking and they direct you to the building you need rather than running your license.

You now have to pay for that priviledge

friends,

I'm delighted to see that our discussions have returned to the topic that Bill Scarborough has always championed: parking! Many were the FacSen meetings when I longed (in the midst of controversy and crisis) for one of Bill's detailed reports on parking.

Let me offer a report from the Land of Rational Parking, where I have just obtained a parking deck permit.

Here at UNCG, one can pay about $200/yr for a "hunting permit" that allows you to search for surface parking (all gone by 7:40, as at USM). As several posters have noted this sort of parking permit is a time-honored (though I personally think reprehensible) practice: at UT in 1985 students could pay $118 for such a hunting permit.

OR, and now things get more interesting, one can pay about $100 to park at a designated remote location and be carried into campus by a fairly comfortable bus to a number of convenient, covered bus stops. This seems pretty good if one is commuting or living fairly far off campus (I live so close that it would take me longer to drive to the remote lot than to drive to campus!)

OR, as I did, one can pay $370 for a deck permit--and a guaranteed spot. Yes, folks, though paying through the nose, I do get something for my money: I can always park in that parking deck (there are three of them, attractive structures that I first mistook for regular buildings). Those without permits can pay to park in the decks but there are limited spaces for this, and when a certain number of paying customers have come in, the deck is closed to all but permit holders--who will still have a place. My deck, by the way, is across the street from the new Humanities building.

OR, and this is way beyond my reach, you can pay some even higher fee (I didn't ask!) for a "Gold Permit" that gives you a numbered spot near your building. No one else can ever park in that specific space.

Now none of this helps the student or staff person much. There's some shared street parking with the city that residents often prefer; many walk in. So my point is not that things are lovely here, but that (hunting permit aside) when you pay big bucks for parking here, you actually get to park; and efforts have been made to provide more reasonable alternatives (the remote lot, and the fact that everyone who pays for the deck and gold permits is someone who isn't competing for regular surface parking--a deck permit will not let you park in those zones).

USM's parking problems are partly because the U. has never charged anything like a reasonable fee and has never taken seriously the notion that it had some obligation to do more than collect money. $50 is a bite compared to past practice, but the key is to make them DO something with that money. Good luck!

And MORE SPACES.
Anne Wallace

Given the discussion about USM parking I thought the board would be interested in the situation at MSU. We have also just increased parking rates to $50/year - effective fall '05. There are notable differences detailed in a memo:
"For the coming year, however, the fee for benefits-eligible employees whose annual earnings are $25,000 or less will remain at $25. We also have made arrangements for parking fees to be treated as a pre-tax payroll deduction, which will result in some net savings to employees. The amount of savings will vary according to individual tax circumstances"
(Memo from president Lee)

It would seem that this precedent of reducing parking fees for low-paid workers would be a good thing for the USM staff association to pursue at USM...

This memo also details new "pay more for a guaranteed space" lots that will cost $70 extra ($120/year total). They have proven to be very popular and requested spaces outnumbered slots available; spaces had to be assigned by lottery.