Give ’em an inch and they may try to park in it, especially if that inch is in a congested area of the Urbana campus.
And beginning July 1, permission to park in that spot will cost a bit more, according to new rates recently announced by the Facilities & Services parking department.
Rates will increase 7.5 percent next fiscal year, to $370 annually for faculty/staff permits and $312 for school-year student permits. Permits for departmental/24-hour spaces, evenings and motorcycles will increase as well; however, charges for bagged meters and day meter tags will remain unchanged, as will costs for metered parking and parking citations.
Since 1995 faculty/staff permits have increased from $225 to $345, and some faculty members think that is too much, although campus officials say those rates are barely covering the costs of the parking program and are far lower than motorists pay at peer institutions.
Parking rates on campus have been the same for the past two fiscal years, despite recommendations in the parking master plan, which indicated that permits should increase by at least 12.5 percent annually through 2009 and that metered parking should be raised to a dollar in order for the campus to cover operating costs for the parking program and finance construction of parking decks around campus to meet the ever-growing demand for parking.
Administration chose not to enact the parking plan’s recommended rate hikes in FY03 and FY04 because the campus community already was feeling the pinch of the state’s lagging economy, said Bob Kelly, director of parking.
However, Kelly said, 7.5 percent increases are unavoidable for FY05 and FY06 to keep pace with rising operating costs, fund renovations of two parking decks in central campus and finance construction of the parking deck just east of the Beckman Institute that is scheduled to open in June.
“Now that we’ve got this deck coming on board, we’ll pick up a $1.4 million bond debt in FY05 that we didn’t have last year,” Kelly said. “And even though we will use some of our reserves to help pay for that, we’re still going to be short next year.”
The $26 million north campus parking deck comprises six levels with more than 1,500 rental spaces, including 150 metered spaces. Negotiations are under way with various retailers and restaurants to lease 20,000 gross square feet of commercial space on the ground level of the deck.
“Leasing of those spaces will not only provide much needed services to the north campus, (it) will help defray the debt costs for the deck. In turn, that helps us fight rate escalations,” said Thomas Skaggs, coordinator for capital development in the Facilities and Services parking department.
In addition, a $5 million renovation program for the parking decks at Fifth and Daniel streets and Sixth and John streets begins in mid-May. The deck at Fifth and Daniel will be refurbished this summer, with completion expected in late August, and the deck at Sixth and John will be renovated during summer 2005. The refurbishments will include brighter lighting, windowed stairwells and other safety enhancements in both structures. Permit holders will be relocated to nearby lots temporarily during renovations.
To cope with some of the traffic congestion on campus, administrators also are investigating proximity-based parking programs, a system used at some other institutions whereby permit fees are based upon the distance between users’ workplaces and the facilities they choose for parking.
A presentation on proximity-based parking programs by Pam Voitik, director of campus services division for Facilities and Services, at the March 29 Urbana-Champaign Senate meeting prompted two resolutions from senate committees and much debate at the April 26 meeting. A resolution sponsored by the Senate Committee on Faculty Benefits called for freezing parking rates at current levels, rejected the implementation of a proximity-based plan and proposed differential rates based on users’ salaries and whether they park in structures or open lots. After debate, the resolution was remanded to the faculty benefits committee for clarification.
The Senate Committee on Campus Operations also presented a resolution, which was amended during debate and ultimately voted down, that demanded administration obtain Senate input on parking operations, including concurrence with the program’s budget, rates and penalties and decisions to usurp parking lots for new construction.
With space for growth limited on much of the campus, parking lots often have been the most feasible sites for new construction, and over the past five to 10 years more than a thousand parking spaces have been consumed by development, most recently the lot west of Bevier Hall where the Institute for Genomic Biology is being built.
Over the next few years, several hundred more spaces probably will be consumed as the campus continues to grow, Skaggs said. The parking master plan, which was developed in 2001, calls for construction of a parking deck in central campus in the vicinity of the C8 and C9 open lots along Sixth Street between Chalmers Street and Armory Avenue; the university is in the early stages of planning.
“Our hope is to build something around 2006 and 2007,” Kelly said. “That may not happen if the economy doesn’t pick up. If the campus tells us there’s no way we’re going to be able to raise rates 12-13 percent, (then it) won’t happen for a couple of years or it’s going to be put off for a long time. If these decks don’t happen, and they still take the surface lots away from us on the core of campus, that means we won’t have parking. That’s the ultimate problem we’re facing.”
The parking master plan indicated that at the time of the study in 2001 the campus’s parking supply was “barely adequate in most sections,” with about 9,700 spaces available and a demand for more than 11,340 spaces.
The plan also indicated that campus growth would necessitate the addition of 5,088 more parking spaces by 2010.