After hearing their parking spaces on central campus might be threatened, more than 60 graduate students expressed concerns to parking officials Wednesday night at a Council of Graduate Students meeting.
The All-University Traffic Committee is considering a recommendation to move graduate student parking from areas such as the intersection of Farm and Shaw lanes to outlying campus areas, such as Farm Lane and Mount Hope Road.
That move would be part of recommendations made by committee members in response to a request by university officials to increase green space on campus as part of the 2020 Vision plan, MSU’s 20-year campus master plan.
Traffic committee members plan to base recommendations on concerns of faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students.
“Twenty years from now the goal is that central campus will be dedicated much more to academic mission and green space,” said MSU police Deputy Chief Mike Rice, who also is a member of the traffic committee. “Campus has moved and recentered itself.”
The traffic committee is in the early stages of designing a parking and transportation system that would eliminate the parking lots on central campus south of the Red Cedar River.
Lyle Burgoon, a pharmacology and toxicology graduate student, said he went to the Wednesday meeting to learn more about the future parking situation. It was his first time attending a COGS meeting.
Burgoon said he thinks parking farther off campus would cause major difficulties for commuters and faculty members.
“A bunch of people in my department are rather concerned about the proposed parking changes,” he said. “I wanted to find out what’s going on to make a better educated decision and possibly defend our viewpoint.
“We don’t want to park further out.”
Some graduate students suggested visitor and commuter parking lots be transformed into faculty and graduate assistant lots, but Rice said those recommendations wouldn’t work.
“Visitor lots contribute significant revenue to the system,” he said. “That revenue is what keeps teaching assistant and faculty parking costs reasonable. To build more ramps would be incredibly efficient, but incredibly expensive.”
Rice said the plan is not to remove only graduate students from campus, but all parking from central campus.
There are 25,000 parking spaces on the entire MSU campus.
Another concern brought up by graduate students was the safety in walking to a bus stop or a parking lot far from the academic core after working late hours.
But Rice said there are other options so people would not have to walk alone at night.
And even after 40 minutes of discussion had passed, some of the students were unsure of their future parking spaces.
“I’m not really clear on what that meeting was about,” said Melise Huggins, a resource development graduate student. “From the way I see it, they’re now crafting a master plan to make MSU a green space, and the first people moved off campus are the graduate students. That’s the bottom line.”
Rice said some of the issues brought up at the meeting might be addressed at today’s All-University Traffic Committee meeting at the Department of Police and Public Safety Building.
“The questions were great - they were heartfelt - and overall I think it was a good meeting,” Rice said.
Megan Frye can be reached at fryemega@msu.edu.
