Staff and faculty make the same trek to campus many of us commuter students do. Parking for students is a nightmare, but parking for staff and faculty is worse.
My parking pass each semester costs me $250 to park wherever I want all day, every day. On the other hand, staff and faculty pay $58.50 per month ($292.5 per semester) for a central campus parking permit.
Prior to the monthly payment option for faculty and staff, they paid around $770 for a year-long central campus parking permit. As of fall 2024, staff and faculty making under $85,000 a year receive a 20% discount on their parking permit.
Health Sciences Lecturers, for example, are paid $1,333 per credit hour. If a lecturer were to only teach one three credit hour class in a semester, they would be paid $3,999. With the 20% discount, they would pay $234 for a parking permit that semester, which is a high amount of pay to be taken and given right back to the institution that pays you. This is especially true for lecturers, who spend time teaching on campus for very little money.
It is unthinkable to charge such high prices for employees who have no choice but to park where they work. Even with the option to park in the 500s lot for free, professors and staff now face the conundrum of lugging everything they need for work across campus and back every day, especially if they teach class at a weird time — like Weekend University — when the shuttle doesn’t run, or if they park in Lot 580 and don’t get the shuttle at all.
Not only is it unfair to charge employees to park at their place of work, but they are also being charged more than students.
There is a clear solution here for the cost of parking: take it from the provost pay. During the provost search, the annual salary was reported as $240,000 to $290,000. If the provost salary was lowered by $40,000 a year, faculty and lecturers wouldn’t have to worry about paying to park where they work.
The provost directly oversees academics and the recruitment and retention of faculty. Making the working conditions for faculty amicable falls under retention and surely some pay can be sacrificed for the good of the university.
In fact, if every vice chancellor were to take a couple-thousand-dollar cut to their annual salary, the new funds could cover the cost of parking permits for all the staff that report to them.
If those solutions fail, I doubt students would be upset if a portion of their tuition went to allowing their professors to get to their class. In fact, many would prefer it to paying fees for on-campus services they rarely, if ever, utilize.
By providing a discount, UCCS has already forged ahead in terms of accommodating staff and faculty’s parking needs. Why stop now? All we need is to focus on what truly matters: the wellbeing of the staff and faculty that create an amazing student experience.
We as an institution need to start putting our staff and faculty first, because they always put students first.
Lot 220. Photo by Anysia Hovel.