Parking is often difficult to find with University Village with over 1,100 residents and 583 parking spaces. Photo credit: Hunter Foote
In a recent article investigating parking at APU, The Clause reported on a project SGA was working on to add up to 40 spaces to University Village’s parking. After bringing the piece of legislation back up with Facilities Management Office officials in a meeting, SGA said the project, approved the 2011-2012 academic year, experienced a setback because of legal and financial difficulties.
The plan, according to senior math major and SGA financial controller Kara Nelson, could have added 10-40 spaces to UV parking, but after some reassessing, facilities leaders said it would only add 8-10.
Senior biology major Sam Papke, who serves as the university senator with the Facilities Management Office, recently dug up the legislation to see if it could get done.
“I brought it up again with Jim Christl, who’s the director of design and construction in facilities management,” Papke said. “So originally, they were excited to do it and it was slated to be done the same year that they redid Cougar Walk. They essentially ran out of time and money during the course of the summer and basically focused their efforts on Cougar Walk. It got lower and lower on the list as far as priorities.”
The problem now is that facilities management has come to realize there are laws and regulations keeping the office from being able to fully redo the parking lot in UV.
“They can’t remove the carports, which would allow us to repaint all the lines, because either city or state law requires that for every residence area you provide carport or garage space. If we remove the carports, we’d have to build garages or something for those areas,” Papke said.
Officials then discussed taking out some existing concrete sidewalks to make room for more spaces; however, that would violate another regulation.
“They said that, again, there’s a city ordinance or a state law that there has to be so much green space represented in the parking lot and when they acquired the property,” Papke said. “When they bought Crestview, it was already below that. But, because the ordinance came in after it was built, they were kind of grandfather claused in. So they didn’t have to make more green space, but they can’t reduce the existing condition.”
Now the plan is to repaint the lines to try to fit in the extra spaces that can be added, but that will not be for a while.
“[Christl] is more than happy and willing to repaint lines where he can whenever repainting [the] UV parking lot comes back up on their yearly budget and stuff they do for maintenance over the summer,” Papke said. “For him, it’s not necessarily a huge priority because it’s so little return on investment and it’s not something they can do right now in the middle of the year.”
According to Papke, a committee is meeting with the dean of student life, facilities and other people to try to figure out a way to alleviate APU’s parking congestion.