With the steady increase in gas prices and insurance rates and the availability of a bus pass with tuition, more students are choosing to leave their cars at home.

“Normally we sell out of permits on the first day of school, but we still have them available this year and that’s the first time I’ve seen this since I started working here,” said Julia Gassman, a 12-year Western employee and current manager of parking and transportation services.

According to parking services, the amount of revenue received from parking permits has decreased in the last two years.

They generated $1,085,581 from parking permits in 2006 and $1,064,788 in 2007.

Even the number of parking tickets given in the last two years has dropped. In the 2006-07 school year there was a total of 17,656 tickets were issued while 15,730 were issued last year.

All the money received from parking permits and tickets issued goes toward paying off expenses and back into the parking system, Stegmeier said. The decrease in tickets and permits means a decrease in parking-system funding.

According to parking services, some of its largest operating expenses include salaries and benefits, the Viking Xpress Buss Pass and maintaining the Lincoln Creek Transportation Center.

“Because the tickets generate revenue, it seems that doing so might create a perception that there is an incentive motivation to ticket excessively because it’s revenue,” Western communication professor Korry Harvey said.

“Although, I think people need to understand that campus security is stuck in a bad situation because they have to have some way to generate revenue in order to do all the functions on this campus that we hold as being vital to campus safety.”

Some students feel the campus police hand out too many tickets and charge too much for petty reasons.

“I think it’s kind of ridiculous how much they charge for tickets because I was parked in a spot without a permit for five minutes, and I just went in to go print something and I got charged $25,” Western senior Lisa Walker said.

Although there have been complaints about high ticket prices, parking services has high fines for a reason, said Randy Stegmeier, director of parking services and chief of campus police.

“If the fines aren’t at a high enough level we’ll find that people just don’t care,” he said. “They’ll take the risk and then the people that pay for their permits are upset due to the fact that their permit isn’t any good because someone is in their space.”

Western senior Paul Foster said he wishes the gravel lots were paved, but realizes that it would be expensive to do so.

Stegmeier said paving the lots is a two-pronged issue because they have to deal with putting in the storm water detention vaults and then getting permission from the city to pave those areas. It would be a multi-million dollar job, he said.

If paving were to be done in the next few years, the first lot to be paved will be the Lincoln Creek Transportation Center parking lot just east of campus, Stegmeier said.

“Once we have a tentative plan in place then we can start focusing our reserves and resources towards doing that and putting in the water detention vaults,” Stegmeier said.

Parking services is preparing to come up with a five-year plan to give them the direction they need to re-surface the lots.

Stegmeier said the renovation of Miller Hall will be a major issue for parking services in early 2010 because they will lose 50 parking spaces during the construction.

One possibility that could help Western’s parking situation is an agreement with Sehome High School for 50 extra spaces in one of its lots.

Stegmeier he doesn't know if the lots  will be available every year because they aren't under university parking services' control, but the 50 spaces in Sehome's lot are excess and they’ve made them available to Western students to park in. The spaces are slightly cheaper than the lots on campus, he said.

For now, Stegmeier said he is trying to stress that new and returning students don’t need a car to get around Bellingham.

“As far as dealing with the heavy incoming class, we’ve been trying to get the message out to students and their parents that especially freshmen do not need a car here,” he said. “They get a bus pass and the transit system here in Bellingham is so good that it makes it very easy to get around.”

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