Friday, March 9, 2007

Parking Space Dilemma

When I first started attending this fine establisment known as a school, students and faculty were required to park around the back side of the building. Things worked out well with this setup. The security guards could see everyone out the front doors, and there plenty of spaces for everyone.

The owners of this building wouldn't allow this ideal parking situation to occur. No, let's build a parking garage and tear down the old spread out lot. Within a year the garage was set up and my school was allowed to park anywhere on floors 4 through 7. Ok, it got a little full at times but we managed.

Our school faculty got extremely tired of this. "Why should we park with the students? We need special reserve parking." And thus the fourth floor was deemed faculty only.

This is where the problems begin. Students can only park on 5-7 and each floor holds 100 spots, max and during the prime hours of school there are at least 500 students on campus. 300 spots for 500 students doesn't work. Showing up to school and parking across the street at the Bed Bath and Beyond was an alternative, as well as parking in a dirt field construction area. The dean got increasingly frustrated with the students. Apparently we are not supposed to park in either place, we just have to continually circle the lot until a spot opens up.

The 3,000 students here didn't take to well to that answer. Why would we? The students rebel and start parking anywhere on floors 1-7 that happen to be open. The Owners of the building throw a very large hissy fit and now we have police patrolling floors 1-3, threatening to tow any student who parks on the inappropriate level.

This greatly frustrates me for the following reason. The entire parking garage is not monitored by security, yet it's ok to have police babysitting students on where to park. That's rediculous and a perfect waste of tax payers money.

The Dean finally gets his butt in gear and calls a lawyer and prepares to sue our landlord. Meetings are held, lots of debates, memos, letters, and so on. Bottom line, a new parking lot will be built and finished by 2009. What we do in the mean time, is a mystery. I'm glad we solved that problem.

3 comments:

lonewolf said...

Sounds like another job for a communication major.

Jan said...

Soooooo what happens in the meantime? Can you park on other floors or at Bed Bath and Beyond?

dani said...

The school has given us 20 spaces along the side of the building which are never free, which of course helps no one but those 20 people. As well as we can park in the "Overflow" (50 spaces) across where the construction is. During the day it's not to bad, but walking there at night is generally not a good idea. Besides that, we've got nothing new.