MSU business sophomore and East Lansing native Claire Fossum started an online petition calling for the MSU and East Lansing Police Departments to lower parking rates.
The petition has 1,405 supporters as of 11:35 a.m. on Feb. 2.
“My friends and I have dealt with it forever and it’s been outrageous,” Fossum said. “I was just like, you know what? I’ll start a petition and see how it goes. And it’s actually gone really well so far.”
Fossum and her hometown friends aren’t the only ones who are fed up with parking on campus and in East Lansing. Graduate students Kathryn Stahl and Meredith Wagner said parking on campus only adds more stress to their day-to-day lives, and agreed it’s expensive.
A Minnesota native, Wagner said the University of Minnesota handled parking similarly with meters stationed throughout campus, adding parking at large seems to be endemic of large college campuses, because there’s just not enough space for cars.
Stahl previously attended Central Washington University where she didn’t park on campus as much, but her friends did.
“I never heard any complaints, unlike here, I hear it all the time, everywhere you go,” Stahl said.
Stahl said scarcity of parking spaces on campus is a big issue for her as well.
“I don’t have classes on certain days until 12:30 (p.m.), but I get to school by 8:45 every morning just to make sure I have parking,” Stahl said. “As a grad student, one of the rules is we have to park south of the river, which is ridiculous because all of my classes are north of the river.”
Stahl said graduate students can park in the International Center parking lot or the lot across from it.
She said she thinks her parking costs “$120-$130 per semester, so you’re looking at $260 to wake up early ... and it’s not even reliable. You have to park in a specific spot only to have classes in the complete opposite spot of campus.”
Expensive parking rates aren’t the only thing Fossum is hoping her petition will impact.
She said accumulating expensive parking tickets from MSU police and East Lansing’s Parking and Code Enforcement, PACE, have cost her hundreds of dollars already.
“The past four years of driving, I’ve probably spent over $500 on tickets, maybe more,” Fossum said. “I’ve lived in East Lansing my entire life. ... My parents have always dealt with getting tickets in our driveway, if you park over the edge or in the grass.”
Fossum described an experience in which a PACE officer prematurely wrote her a ticket while waiting for the time on her parking meter to expire.
“I put in probably 15 minutes worth and was timing myself to make sure I didn’t get a ticket, and I ran outside and there’s a PACE officer already standing there, already writing me a ticket and I know the time hadn’t run out yet,” Fossum said.
Fossum said she asked the PACE officer if she started writing the ticket prior to the meter running out.
“She was like, ‘Well, I already wrote it,’” Fossum said.
According to the 2014 ELPD Annual Report, the number of PACE Parking Citations issued in 2014 was 45,099, while the number of PACE Enforcement Citations issued in 2014 was 1,154.
“If the cost of parking tickets were lower, like $10 instead of $25-$35, it would be like, ‘OK, I can pay that’,” Fossum said. “As college students, we don’t have an extra $35 to pay to the city of East Lansing.”
