Although many students complain about a $25 parking citation, Eric Crouch has bigger numbers on his mind. Among million-dollar projects and operating costs in the hundreds of thousands, Texas Tech’s Transportation and Parking Services’s budget is enough to keep Crouch, the managing director, more than busy.
Citations
Crouch said the department’s revenue budget is heavily supported by citations and permit sales since he began working there. In the last four semesters – the 2012 and 2013 academic years – TPS has issued more than 135,000 citations on campus. According to Crouch, that’s a significant number.
“Citations make up a fifth of our revenue budget,” Crouch said. “Permit sales make up the remainder. Total budget is at $5.5 million. Citations have held pretty steady in the budget at $1.1 million for almost as many years as I’ve been in parking.”
Crouch said there is a sense of anticipation when it comes to the exact dollar amount that citations will provide, but that the department has a rough expectation of how much the citations make up for the budget.
“We budget $1.05 million a year for citation revenue,” Crouch said. “In all the years I’ve been involved with parking, it’s never dropped below that. Some years it’s really close to that. Some years it may be $1.2 or .3 million. So it kind of fluctuates, but we try to be real conservative on that estimate in the event that everything works out and there aren’t as many citations.”
According to a 2014 transportation and parking services’ presentation of the paperless citation case study, there was an almost 10,000 increase in tickets from the 2012 fiscal year to the 2013 fiscal year.
Last fall, Crouch said, the department did see a spike in citations issued thanks in part to the new paperless citation system, but he hopes people will learn their lesson and the numbers will begin to decrease again.
Although citations are a significant amount of the budget, Crouch said he prefers revenue from a different, less contentious source.
“We’d rather sell a permit, and I tell students that all the time, and I talk to them,” Crouch said. “You know, we get folks in here who [have] gotten a boot or gotten towed, and I’m visiting with them, and I tell them, ‘I really, honestly don’t want your citation revenue. You’ve got better stuff to spend your money on than parking tickets, but I do want your permit money if you’re going to park on campus,’ But citations – I’d really rather you park where you’re supposed to and spend that money on something else.”
Crouch said he would rather sell permits than charge violators because it makes more money in the long run.
“So our goal was to work the lots more frequently and get better enforcement of the lots and hopefully then [get] better voluntary compliance out of folks parking. And then you can sell more permits because there’s less spoilage in the lot from people who don’t belong.”
Fees
Because of things like fluctuation in the amount of citation revenue that Transportation and Parking Services collects annually, other things like fees are also an important component of the budget that Crouch deals with daily.
“The fee committee recommended a fee increase for this coming semester, and I think the board approved 3.2 [percent] overall, and I think the fee increase was 3 (percent),” Crouch said. “The addition of Safe Ride, and others — an increase in fuel cost, it’s expensive.”
Crouch shot the fee increase down, however, and has long argued against its implementation in order to keep transportation affordable for students using the system. The transportation fee, a $48 charge for all students enrolled full-time, covers services like SafeRide and the on-campus bus system – not parking services or development.
If all 33,111 students enrolled at Texas Tech in the fall of 2013 paid the transportation fee, that would rake in more than $1.5 million, but not all students at Tech pay the fee.
“You only pay a transportation fee. There’s no global parking fee,” Crouch said. “There have been schools that have implemented that parking fee, I’ve long argued against that at Tech, because that has come up over the years, (if) we should do something like that. I think the beauty of the system we have now is if you don’t use it, you don’t have to pay for it.”
Flint’s Figures
On-campus development of things like parking garages are also costly maneuvers for the department, Crouch said. The Flint Parking Garage on the corner of 18th and Flint was funded completely out of the pocket by the department, Crouch said. That 791-space development, in particular, was actually an expensive, multimillion dollar increase.
Crouch said the garage’s costs are upwards of a million dollars a year, but adding up the costs of a space in the garage wouldn’t cover the structure’s costs, so other revenue sources – like parking permits sold – pick up the slack. The garage is half-supported by the permits sold for spaces inside the commonly known ‘Garage Mahal’ – a rip off of the name of the famous Indian landmark, the Taj Mahal -and the other half is covered by revenue from permits sold for spaces elsewhere on campus.
Crouch said the experience with the Flint Garage has pushed his department to consider alternative options for potential on-campus garage construction in the future.
“In the intervening years, what we’ve done is we’ve been changing that price structure and getting those processes where they need to be so that hopefully it doesn’t take nearly as much of an increase this next round to do a second parking garage,” Crouch said.
The Flint Garage did push prices for parking on campus up slightly, according to Crouch, who remembers his student days as ones with inexpensive, but less parking on campus.
“When I was a student, my first permit on campus was [a] residence hall permit [which] was $32, and so for a long time, Texas Tech had really inexpensive parking, and everybody drove, and that’s just the way it worked. As we grew, we reached the point where we needed that parking structure, and we didn’t have the reserves built up for it. So the only way to do that then was to raise permit prices.”
Crouch, who started at Transportation and Parking Services in 1999, said he understands the concerns that students have with the money they pay for the system used for their transportation around campus.
“My vision starting in 2006 was to really work closely with our stakeholders, because at the end of the day it’s y’all’s parking system. What is it you’re wanting, and what do you want us to accomplish? And it’s my permit money, too. I buy a permit, and I want it spent right, doggone.”
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