John Siemianowski is thankful he has only received one ticket this semester.
The biology senior drives into campus at least twice a week, and always searches for parking.
Siemianowski said he parks at meters and then doesn’t worry if they expire, but when the parking ticket prices were raised in July, it made him more cautious about where he parked.
In July 2001, the MSU Board of Trustees raised ticket fines, hoping to deter illegal parking on campus.
Fines at parking meters were raised from $10 to $15, employee parking spot fines were raised from $20 to $25 and spots reserved for people with disabilities were raised from $50 to $100.
But Siemianowski said the $5 increase isn’t enough to stop everyone from parking illegally.
“I bet if they had raised them even more people wouldn’t park wherever they wanted,” he said. “I know my roommate drives in every day and parks in an employee lot.”
But MSU police Deputy Chief Mike Rice said there has to be a way to punish people who park illegally.
“There has to be sanctions for people who don’t use the system correctly,” Rice said. “Those are parking tickets and fines.”
Rice said ticket fines haven’t been raised since 1986, when they were doubled.
He said when the fines were raised, the Department of Police and Public Safety wrote half as many tickets as it had the year before.
In 1985, parking enforcers wrote 135,219 tickets. In the year following the price hike, 69,225 tickets were written.
In 2001 the department wrote 113,681 tickets.
Rice said he expects the increase in parking fines to reduce the number of tickets.
With the new parking ramps, such as the ramp by the Communication Arts and Sciences Building, students will have more legal parking spots, Rice said.
“Everybody focuses on the fact that you get a ticket and are unhappy,” he said. “Well I’m unhappy too when I get a ticket, but it’s just part of the system.
“It appears to me as though there is a downward trend in the number of parking tickets issued on campus. And we believe that increasing the fines has encouraged this trend.”
But Rice also said the impact won’t be nearly as high as when the fines were doubled in 1986.
The board could not raise the fines any higher than they are now because of a state law capping the amount a university can fine motorists.
Rice said the department would like to see the state’s cap on ticket costs raised.
“I don’t think we’ll see nearly as much of a hike as before,” he said. “A $5 increase is not as much of a hike as doubling.
“If we had increased the fines from $20 to $40 then there would have been a tremendous impact.”
Jim Taglauer, a parking enforcer, said although he’s not sure if the amount of tickets decreased, students may be watching where they park more carefully.
“I think that students are more aware of parking in general,” the social relations junior said. “Especially in handicap spots, I know those fines went up quite high.”
