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Miami parking wants to cut costs and better serve students

Amelia Carpenter, Online Staff

(ERIN KILLINGER | The Miami Student)

It's not all about nailing students with tickets in the world of Miami University parking. Assistant Director of Parking and Transportation Services Vanessa Cummings would argue instead that, "we're here to help you."

Cummings said that's the office's priority, and changes throughout the year will help cut costs and better serve students. The office has to balance a budget of its own, separate from the university. Among the changes are tweaking Miami Metro routes and times and the implementation of a new software. The Metro routes are set to change as soon as spring semester, and the new software should launch in late November or early December.

Parking is an auxiliary to the university — essentially a self-sufficient operation within the campus police department — that has bounced around from being its own entity or under Housing, Dining and Guest Services for several years. MUPD has overseen parking since February 2010.

Change didn't stop then, however.

Employees within Parking and Transportation Services took on more responsibilities after the university budget crisis resulted in eliminated positions including former director of parking Perry Gordon's position. His post was eliminated in July.

Vice President of Finance and Business Services and Treasurer David Creamer was forced to find ways to organize the number of public safety issues more efficiently and moved the auxiliary back under Miami University Police Department.

"At the end of the day, the decision was mine and none of these choices were easy," Creamer said. "This is not the fun part of the job. There are great implications when we provide them with that notification (they've been laid off)."

MUPD Lieutenant Ben Spilman has since managed the responsibilities of Parking and Transportation Services director.

"(Parking and Transportation Services now) operates with fewer staff, but it does not diminish services we are making available to students," Creamer said. "The reductions to students are as transparent as possible."

Creamer said the service has not diminished and performance remains high.

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"In my mind this is a good decision in regard to other choices I might have made," he said.

The state-of-the-art software costs about $100,000 and will update the current 12-year-old system, Cummings said.

The new system will have expedited billing, appeal and ticketing services and will use less paper. The use of recycled paper as well as renewable hangtags and stickers were implemented this fall.

"It's going to be a major undertaking for the next few months," Cummings said last spring, adding that transferring the existing data will be a time-consuming process to change to the new system.

Student accounts will be linked through the BannerWeb website and students will have the option of paying fines through the bursar or online with a credit card with the new system. In the meantime, ticket officers are handwriting tickets. There's no way to look up a car's ticket history, so no warning citations have been issued during the implementation process. The new electronic ticket machines will put an end to undeserved first-offense tickets. Each student is granted one warning each fiscal year. Cummings said students who have recently received tickets without a warning should consult the parking office in the Campus Avenue Building within 10 business days to exchange.

Cummings said some Miami Metro routes are rarely utilized and are a waste of fuel and money.

"We need to be more efficient in the use of the buses," Cummings said, adding that student input will be weighed heavily for the new routes and times.

Parking services will hold an event as early as mid-October for students to give their feedback.

"We want to get student input to look at the routes," she said. "We need (the students) to be honest."

The majority of Parking and Transportation Services revenues are from car fines and permits. In fiscal year 2010, fines were $680,431 and permits brought in $655,406. Revenues for car fines totaled $779,906 during fiscal year (FY) 2009. Permit revenues were $631,809 for the same year.

Parking and Transportation Services generated $1.6 million in total revenues for both FY09 and FY10 with $81,000 net decrease in funds.

Car permit revenues increased 78 percent in FY08 primarily due to improved costs and access starting in February 2008 to the Campus Avenue Building Garage, which opened in 2006.

The North Campus Garage opened in July 2008 and originally, students could not park in the North Campus Garage until after 5 p.m. and it was $1 per hour with a $10 daily maximum.

Since February 2008, anyone could park in either garage for 50 cents an hour with a daily maximum of five dollars. Students, faculty and staff could purchase a daytime pass valid from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. for the North Campus Garage for $25 a month or $100 a semester. Overnight passes for either garage were $75 a month or $300 a semester with a university permit. University permits cost $100 a year. Overnight parking in either garage is not permitted otherwise.

The addition of the second parking garage behind the School of Engineering and Applied Science contributed to the $85,014 parking garage revenues with total revenues of $1.2 million for FY08.

The North Campus Garage holds 670 parking spots and on average, cycles two to three times through each week day, Cummings said. That means the garage is collecting revenue for more than 1,800 spots a day.

Cummings said about 40 percent of students drove to class during the 2010 to 2011 academic year. Spilman said numbers were unavailable for the current school year because students were still registering vehicles.

Cummings said she doesn't expect to collect more than 50 percent parking citation fines because of the one-time warning policy and visitor vehicles being difficult to track down. Collecting less than 50 percent total citation fines has been a trend for many years, according to Cummings.

"We've collected on less than 50 percent of our tickets," she said. "How much of that will we actually collect on? It's hard to know."

Revenue had to be generated by increasing costs for parking services. Spilman said they hoped to decrease garage traffic in the North Campus Garage by raising the price for the first hour.

"We're hoping people will think before driving to campus [not] simply driving in to class," he said. "There is such a problem with traffic congestion anyway and it was kind of feeding the problem with [it being] very cheap to drive in for one hour."


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