]Most everyone who has ever parked in East Lansing has experienced an unwanted run-in with East Lansing’s parking enforcement agency, Parking and Code Enforcement, or PACE.
For the city of East Lansing, parking revenue is the second largest annual source of operating revenue, behind only sewage user service charges. East Lansing sees more operating revenue from parking expenses than it does from charging its residents for water usage, according to city documents.
The number of annual parking tickets issued by PACE has been generally trending downward over the course of the last 10 years. East Lansing saw a large drop in tickets issued during the 2007 fiscal year, this coming just after a new parking garage in East Lansing was constructed, now located on West Circle Drive next to Olin Health Center.
Since the construction of the new parking ramp on West Circle Drive, PACE has issued fewer and fewer tickets each year, but East Lansing still has seen a relative increase in parking revenue. This correlation allows one to speculate that East Lansing drivers are parking in ramps and at meters more often, and parking illegally less often.
Some students are reluctant to park in parking ramps because gambling on parking in the city for longer than the posted time limit is worth skipping paying for a ramp when they don’t get a parking ticket.
Such is the case with general management senior Brady Lehman.
“I usually park in ramps because a parking ticket is pretty expensive,” Lehman said. “But if I won’t be on campus for much longer than an hour or two, I skip the ramps because I’d rather park for free, which is the case if I don’t get a ticket when I park on a side street. Sometimes it backfires though.”
Lehman said most times, parking ticket charges are still less than what he would pay for a pass.
“Some days I park in the city for upwards of six hours and don’t get a ticket,” he said. “Other days I park for one class and have a ticket on my windshield when I get back to my car. Just the luck of the draw really.”
East Lansing also sells monthly parking passes for parking garages in the city. Lehman said he won’t buy one though.
“After a handful of parking tickets you can’t help but think about (buying a pass),” he said. “But those passes aren’t cheap, and I don’t drive every day so I won’t buy one.”
As for the reputation of PACE in the area, the agency is seen as a strict one according to finance junior Jake Wamhoff.
Wamhoff said, “Oh, (my friends) all think PACE is pretty strict. Like my last ticket, I was in CVS for only 20 minutes and I still had one because I didn’t pay the meter, they don’t miss many opportunities to get you.”
After learning the city’s revenue from the Automobile Parking System Fund, which does not include parking tickets, Wamhoff was stunned.
“You’d think if the city made that much money on parking then they could afford to be a little more lenient in writing tickets,” Wamhoff said.
