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Patrick Kass, Director of Parking & Transportation, Speaks with Classified Staff Notes from
Patrick Kass' Presentation
Comments posed on the parking issue: I am writing to
protest, in the strongest possible terms, the parking
rate hikes recently approved by your office. Parking on
campus already costs more than our medical insurance.
That makes no sense. With these rate hikes, within the
next four years, parking will cost more than double our
health insurance. Ostensibly, these
rate increases are meant to encourage faculty and staff
to use alternate methods of transportation. I applaud
the concept and would be delighted to do so if the
demands of my job made it possible. However, my duties
cannot be completed within a standard 40 hour week under
ordinary circumstances. With the upcoming staff cuts
and recent salary lines sweeps, I can only envision my
workload increasing. When Parking &
Transportation proposed their rate increases, they cited
peer institutions; what they did not cite was the number
of universities who don't charge staff for parking or
who charge only nominal fees, of which there are a
number. Further, I do not recall any invitation for
staff to provide input on this decision; rather the
announcement appeared as a fait accompli. Public
meetings are to be scheduled after the fact which does
not seem to give us an opportunity to participate in the
process. Additionally, a major focus of the rate
increase is to fund new garage construction. If we are
truly trying to encourage alternate methods of
transportation, why should we pay more so this
'self-sustaining unit' can build more garages when
garage use should decrease with more people using
alternate means of transportation? Finally, safety is a
huge concern on campus but it is not addressed here. I
frequently leave campus after 7:30pm. Due to my erratic
hours, I would be forced to use public transportation
which would have me walking a minimum of 1/2 mile from
the bus stop, by myself, sometime around 8:15-8:30pm. I
feel that this would put me at grave personal risk. I strongly urge you
to reconsider your decision to approve the rate
increases for parking and open the issue up to
campus-wide discussion. * * * When an organization reserves spots in the garages, is the garage reserved for the whole day for those spots or just for the time period requested? It seems that the garage as a whole is completely reserved quite often. Do they really need it for the whole day?? Do they reserve only what they need or do they pad their numbers by a lot? I believe that they reserve much more than what is really needed. They also need more help at the cashiers window. They other night at 6pm the line of people was very long with only one cashier and the gates were not working properly so there also was a huge back up of cars. A big mess for 6pm on a Monday. Garage reservations may be for the entire day, however, when possible we will open the garage for visitors after the event ends. Departments pay a cost per space for the reservations, so it is improbable that they would “pad” their numbers, although there have been times that the number of guest has been overestimated. We now regularly staff the Second Street Garage with a second cashier and the other garages as needed. We are currently analyzing date from our new parking management system to try and better manage the peak times. * * * How can Parking & Transportation (P&T) justify this type of increase, (although recently amended for the first year) when there have not been any significant employee related raises and none seen in the near future. For zone 1 lot holders, we are looking at a $300 increase, and for what? Really We have many employees still making under $25K a year, some who may lose their home, etc. How can you put such a burden on these employees when they are here to benefit The University of Arizona? Maybe to some this increase is just a drop in the bucket and won’t even blink an eye, but to some it is a burden and you need to know that. In the past students, faculty, and employees could park in the surrounding streets for free but the City of Tucson took that away years ago. Issues P&T tells us that they are self sustained which is one of the reasons for the increase. P&T does not pay for utilities or taxes for the property they are on, if they do please let us know what is the cost? In my own opinion P&T benefits greatly from regular parking customers; visitors who purchase passes or park in garages; vendors who purchase permits; special events paid for by other departments; citations; meter costs. Then you have sports events, oh yeah, reserved spaces, more money! Parking meters alone cost .25cents for every 15 minutes, what a kill. When I started working, meters were .25cents for every ½ hour and it changed not too long after that, wow! What a profit. In downtown you can park at meters for up to an hour on one quarter. It seems that nobody looks at the big picture when it relates the construction of new buildings and lots and how will these affect traffic flow once built? Trying to get out of the area around Cherry, Helen, Mountain at the end of the day can be a nightmare. People exiting the Highland Garage and Zone 1 lots to the south get into real traffic jams, especially with the pedestrian walkways. I believe more stop signs are needed so that traffic will flow more smoothly thus reducing the chance of accidents with vehicles and/or pedestrians. I’m not sure where the responsibility lands when it comes to U of A owned streets and City of Tucson owned streets. With the increase in parking at the U of A, nothing has been done to the parking lots and surrounding areas with regards to wear and tear. Lots are not re-paved only re-stripped, potholes are not fixed, and flooding is still an issue at many parking areas. New Programs We have been hearing about new programs for ever. Although we complete the required Pima Government travel survey, I have not seen much change. The only thing that has been added is designated carpool spaces which are very rarely used. Care share, what is this? I read that P&T wants to develop system where employees who ride bus, or park in Park and Ride lots can rent U of A vehicles to run errands. If true, more profit for P&T and will require more space to keep such vehicles. I believe that The University of Arizona Parking & Transportation needs to work more closely with the City of Tucson and Suntran to develop a system for University students, faculty and staff. New garage construction is expensive. Garages are more dangerous, promote theft and damage to cars is inevitable. Maybe you don’t need a $15 million dollar garage. Need to re-think garage construction. As an auxiliary enterprise, PTS does pay an Administrative Service Charge to cover the cost of utilities and other services provided by the University. This will cost $1.2 Million this year. We do not receive any state funding. We set our rates in compliance with University policy to cover only the cost of operating the department, including infrastructure improvements such as new lots and garages. We must charge users in order to pay for parking garages and lots, shuttle service and Federal and State mandated alternative transportation activities. It takes over $14 million to provide these services to the campus community. New garages must be built to maintain the current parking ratio of 1 space for every 4 people on campus. New building construction will take away hundreds of parking spaces in the future and these must be replaced to accommodate a reasonable number of parkers on campus. The balance is the alternative transportation programs to help the others get to campus and these must be funded. Parking and Transportation created a model type that addressed the cost of the different travel methods of students and employees of the UA. The model states that the annual cost of someone driving alone everyday, assuming that gas is about $2.00 a gallon, comes to an astounding $ 1343. If people plan on carpooling to and from campus, that lowers the cost substantially to $ 446 if there are three people in the car. But the most budget minded means of transportation is the Sun Tran bus pass. The bus pass for a year comes to a cost of $ 275. For information on comparing costs to commute to and from the UA campus by transportation mode type, please visit: http://parking.arizona.edu/programchanges/index.php?ccc=1#ccc . This chart compares daily and annual expenses for a Sun Tran Bus Pass, Carpooling, Park & Ride Lots and Driving Alone to and from campus. Check out which mode of transportation best fits your needs! * * * I work in the College of Medicine and would like to find out about the new parking structure that is going to be built in the UPH parking lot. Many of us here at the COM would gladly pay to park in that structure since parking here is not the best. I come in when it is dark and many times leave when it is dark. There are meetings off campus and parking is difficult to say the least. The Highland Garage is not a good parking situation for us at the COM. The new garage on Ring Road will be operated by UMC. Unfortunately, at this time, they are projecting that it will be used to capacity by UMC staff members. Long range plans include an additional parking garage to be located near Helen and Campbell to increase parking access near AHSC. We are also going to be converting a portion of the large surface lot west of the hospital over to UA parking. * * * With the price of parking increasing, can we be more creative with parking passes? For example, sell parking permits that are good for 3 days a week or 2 days a week ("fractional parking permits")? I would gladly use the bus SOME of the time, but with appointments, errands to run before/after work or at lunch, it's unrealistic for me to go without driving to UA completely. Some California university campuses offer this. It would be helpful to employees, and probably overall the dept would make more money for the effort. Could this idea be investigated for UA? We are investigating these types of permits and hope to be able to offer these at some time in the future. We are moving toward prepaid garage parking that will be offered at a discount. * * * Regarding parking permit increases. I think we need to understand the stated purpose of the increases in parking fees: to get people to think twice about parking on campus, to get people to carpool, walk or ride and to understand that the priority is parking for students. When I bought my house, I consciously looked for a house close enough to bike if necessary, on a bus route and less than 5 miles away! Agreed! Keep in mind the other half of the equation is that we presently offer about one space for every four people on campus. We want to maintain that ratio, so we do need to build new parking as new construction of campus buildings occurs on the surface parking lots. * * * I would like to express my great concern about the increase in parking fees. First of all, I think this is absolutely outrageous. I feel that the comparison made didn't take into account the economic factors of who they compared us to. I do not have an alternate transportation option as I work 7:30am - 4:30pm which is different from most other people. In addition I have a weekly meeting for which I need to leave campus on my lunch hour every Tuesday, and I need to have a reasonable way of not making this a two hour event because of parking issues. I also have children that I need to drop off and pick up before and after work so the more time it takes to park the worse it is for them too. Public transportation from the far Southwest side of town is nonexistent and to park and ride would take me 2 hours and 20 minutes one way. It irritates me that most of the first floor of the parking garage is take up by student vehicles that hardly move. I've seen cars in the same exact spot for several days without moving. Why not make students park on the outskirts of campus and give priority parking to the people who need to come and go everyday. I also think that in a recession when people are loosing their jobs, even if it's not the UofA employee it might be their family member, this is not the time to be making such huge hikes in the rates. In addition, there are other ways of making money without gouging employees, for example, raise the parking fines! If you raised the parking fines and just ticked the people in the 20 minute parking spots who park for class and the speeders in the parking garage, you could make lots of extra money. In addition with all the budget cuts I highly doubt that we will be getting a pay increase anytime soon, which makes the parking hike even worse, this means that now instead of just not getting ahead with all the increases in parking and health insurance etc, we will now be losing money. * * * In reference to the parking situation, I believe that Parking and Transportation should do more to encourage ride-sharing or car-pooling. I ride-share with 2 other U of A staff and we now have a ride-share parking space and split the cost. We also save a lot of money on gasoline and mileage on our autos. We have been trying to get a 4th person but are limited in how we contact other staff of the U of A to let them know we have this spot available. We meet at the Desert Diamond Casino parking lot in Sahuarita. The problem with the Pima County website for ride-share is it gives you names of individuals who work in places other than the University - which is just not convenient. We sent emails to our working areas, but we do not have access to a "university-wide" email that would reach all staff that live in the Sahuarita/Green Valley area. If Parking and Transportation had something set up on their website so that people interested in car-pooling could contact people who live in their area that would be a huge help. It would also be beneficial if ride-share was "advertised" more and the benefits of saving gasoline, etc. were "out there" for people to start thinking along these lines and get more car pools going. It would be interesting to know how many car pools are now recognized at the U of A and have a campaign to increase these numbers. It is time to push this and I don't think Parking and Transportation is doing enough to connect people for this effort. The University controls access to email lists for privacy reasons. Those who wish to sign up for Car Share should go to www.pagnet.org/rs/carpool/ . This site will provide email addresses of those signed up in your area. It will include potential matches of employees of nearby businesses, but if you can simply choose not to contact those people if you do not want to. If you only want to University employees to respond, note that in the comment section. We will look at providing a university only ride matching program on our website. We do not want to duplicate an already existing program at PAG, but will determine whether it makes sense to have and maintain our own. Our last survey indicated that about 10% of our employees carpooled at least some of the time. We agree that more education and publicity about these programs will make them more successful. We will continue to let people know as best we can via press releases, mailing, emails, and other creative ways. We hope that you will also help us spread the word! * * * Is anything being done to deter vehicle theft from the parking garages? I work in a small unit in which 2 co-worker's vehicles were stolen within a 7 month period (7/06-2/07). I was told the UA would not install security cameras due to potential liability issues. I don't understand the issue since we pay to park at our own risk. I have purchased the Club from Parking & Transportation but that's not the answer. In Main Gate garage, the cashier booth is positioned by one of the entrances not the exit. It's not acceptable to say that since we live so close to Mexico that we just have to learn to live with it. Parking & Transportation Services (PTS) employs 4 full time employees to patrol the garages. Their main purpose is to observe the garage for potential issues—crime, suspicious persons, accidents, unlawful movements, and illegal parking. UAPD also regularly patrols the garages. UAPD relies upon the general public to be aware of their surroundings and to notify them when anything suspicious or unusual is noticed. We encourage everyone to be vigilant for anything out of the ordinary and report it to UAPD. With everyone’s help, we can make the campus safer. PTS works closely with UAPD to help prevent theft and all crime in all of our lots and garages and throughout campus. We have many employees around campus we have given them all the task to keep their eyes open for suspicious activity and to notify UAPD to check it out. We also have four full time safety officers who patrol the garages. We realize that this is an open campus in an urban environment and this makes crime nearly inevitable. However, as noted above, by working together, in the nature of true “Community Policing” and reporting suspicious people, hiding valuables, watching out for your neighbor’s belongings, we can drastically reduce the amount of crime. UAPD targets specific areas if they notice an increase in reported crimes, both through undercover operations and extra patrols. So, although we hope it never happens, please report all crimes to UAPD. The Club is very helpful and is a deterrent to car theft. It is not foolproof, however, a car thief is very likely to see it in your car and decide to go to elsewhere. We do sell steering wheel locks on behalf of UAPD in our office. * * * When they did the parking fee survey, did they also do a wage and salary survey of the same institutions? I don't think it is right if they want to charge us parking fees similar to ASU unless they are willing to pay us at the same wage/salary rates. We did not do a wage or salary survey. We based our increases on the cost of maintaining our number of parking spaces and providing alternatives to those who wish to use them.What has Parking and Transportation done and what will they be doing to cut expenses? They shouldn't expect us to make sacrifices (excessive increase in parking fees) to support their unit unless they have also made sacrifices. PTS continuously looks at ways to save money. We have eliminated several positions and do not fill vacant spots without consideration of the usefulness of the position and whether we can do without it. We have filled full-time positions with part time student employees where possible—we now have 49 student and on-call employees, which is about 29% of our employees. We use academic employees where possible and contract services when it’s possible to save money by doing so. We do our own maintenance. We have traded in many of our trucks for golf carts which are not only cheaper to purchase, but are cheaper to operate. We have also automated many of our services. Automation allows us to use fewer personnel. * * * While in theory I don't have a problem with the increase, but to the extent that daily I see the CatTrans numerous time with the average passenger load of 3 people - seems that that P&T could look at reducing their own area before just pushing it all on the Faculty, Students and Staff. Also why is it necessary to sweep the streets on a daily basis - that seems to be another way to cut back. P & T needs to be a "team" with the campus not the parking police. CatTran transported nearly half of a million passengers last year. We have the second largest transit system in Southern Arizona (only SunTran is larger). One of the options we are promoting for cheaper parking is the off-campus parking with shuttle service to campus. More cars off campus will increase ridership both from the off-campus lots and on the intra campus routes. Facilities Maintenance sweeps the streets. PTS will continue to do all we can to assure that Faculty, Staff, Students, and Visitors have access to campus. Part of what we do is to insure that those who invest in a parking permit are able to park in their assigned areas. This requires that we enforce the parking regulations. We will continue to do so. * * * Who is given free parking in the parking garages? No one specifically receives free parking in the garages--even President Club member permits are paid for. Retirees do presently receive a free permit for zoned surface areas, but disabled retirees may access garages for free in order to have proximate parking. There is one group that gets free access in and out of the garages at any time—UAPD. We think it’s very important that the police patrol inside the garages regularly so each police cruiser has full access to the garages. In the comparisons used to determine the upcoming increases, what is the percentage of the staff's gross wages attributable for parking; i.e. what percentage of an administrative assistant's wages at Wells Fargo, or UC Berkeley or Ohio State is spent on garage parking as compared to the same level of administrative assistant at the University of Arizona? We did not use this comparison to set rates. The chart only compares our rates to others as a benchmarking tool. The increase was determined by the amount of funding needed for new programs and future new garage construction to replace lost parking spaces. We want to provide alternatives that allow people to make a choice about how much they want to spend for access to campus. From free—a bus pass (in a couple of years, but subsidized up to 50% right now) or biking to parking off campus to three levels of parking on campus. However, we did an analysis adjusting permit prices based on the cost of living index for the city where each institution is located and the relative position of our permit prices to the others did not substantially change. Most UA staff members, if they are not part of the reduction in force, will probably not receive even a cost-of-living increase. Contributions to benefits have increased and parking has increased. Staff members are taking less home with each increase, which means less disposable income to infuse into the economy, therefore contributing to the downward spiral of the economy. With all of the brilliant minds on this campus (and I mean that sincerely--not sarcastically), there ought to be a more creative solution. We will be offering people alternatives that will cost less than what they are paying now. We understand that some won’t be as convenient, or even possible, for some people, but most people will have options that they can use that will cost less than they presently pay for parking. They will, of course, still be able to choose to pay for parking as well on a permit available basis. Also, since parking is a pre-tax benefit, next years increase will be less than $2 per pay period. For more
information contact
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