Text of Email Exchange between Staff Senator Crystal Grant and Ken Swalagin (most recent first)
on parking registration/decals:
Response received from Crystal Grant, 11/3/2008 4:04 PM
to be fair, i was not sure how we looked at university policy and i agree,
this is a bit narrow... however, after hearing from colleagues, i walked a
parking lot here on campus; very large lot and i observed that there are a
lot of cars opting not to affix the registration sticker to their windows
per se, they are using scotch tape...
i see no problem with the current system as it stands in terms of expense
recovery, but i too agree that registration can be achieved in another way;
the application process can require additional information that can keep a
year-to-year update on vehicles... as to more than one vehicle on campus at
one time or limiting how many vehicles can be on campus should be of no
concern to the institution in my humble opinion, the parking rate affords
some flexibility with vehicle choice when one rotates with a spouse, has a
leased car due to accident, or general scheduled maintenance...
i guess as i was too trying to defend the policy, i could not come up with a
sound enough reason as to why a sticker for registration purposes could not
be so harsh on one's car... the options that i came up with is changing the
backing of the sticker to be a magnet, to avoid multiple cars, the sticker
and the hangtag match numerically (this option appears expensive)
forgo second car registration-- have hangtag and magnetic registration
sticker flexible to move from car to car
change location of the existing registration sticker- require registration
sticker to be placed on the back of the hang tag
registration should be viewed as a faculty, staff, student, or visitor not a
vehicle, perhaps we can eliminate the registration sticker entirely and only
use the hang tag (that should be a savings)... i hope this helps... crystal
----- Original Message -----
From: <swalagin@rci.rutgers.edu>
To: "Crystal M Grant" <cmgrant@andromeda.rutgers.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 9:29 AM
Subject: Re: parking and transportation
Crystal,
Thanks for your message, and for forwarding your constituents' concerns.
I will bring this to the attention of the Senate Executive Committee, but
it doesn't seem like the kind of broad issue the Senate would consider.
Rather than a "university policy," this is actually a procedure of the
Parking Department.
The type of sticker that's used by the Parking Department(s), as
an adjunct to the hangtags, is intended to be difficult to remove
so that
folks won't pay to register only one vehicle, then switch it between other
vehicles they may drive to campus (I have several myself, but if only one
were registered, and I incorrectly parked one of the others, they
wouldn't know it was my vehicle). Also, if the decal were multi-year,
everyone
would have to pay multiple years in advance. And because parking fees
are based on salaries, which change year to year, they can't be
calculated for
future years.
If you know of options that you believe make sense after you've considered
the above, please let me know so I can convey them to the Executive
Committee as well. I still doubt that it would get the issue assigned to a
Senate committee (this one would go to Budget and Finance), given its
specificity, but it might help to broaden the issue to one that is
chargeable.
Ken Swalagin
Email message received from Crystal Grant 10/27/2008 4:01 PM:
a few colleagues have approached me about parking policy and i wonder if
this is a consideration for the senate... the question is can we change
policy to either exclude the parking sticker decal entirely from its
annual requirement or change the life of the sticker? the issue has more
to do with technology... the complaint is how difficult it is to remove
the sticker from the vehicle, several options were posed that i thought
made perfect sense, but when i approached management on this campus, i
was
told this is university policy... can this be brought to the senate?
crystal