Faculty, staff hit with parking woes

Yvonne Campbell, coordinator of non-credit programs is fed up. She said some Southern University faculty and staff are wrongly receiving parking tickets.
“Faculty and staff pay for permission to park in certain areas,” Campbell said. “When we come to work or if we leave during the day and go to another building on campus in our vehicles and we come back, there is no where for us to park. The parking that’s on the street, they’ve cut down on the number of spots.”
Campbell said students are occupying the spaces designated for faculty, leaving them no place to park.
“We have to drive around the parking lot three or four times waiting for students to get out of spots that are clearly designated for faculty and staff,” Campbell said. “Our problem is campus police comes and gives us tickets for not being parked properly in spots that are designated for faculty and staff, when in fact we can’t get in those spots.”
She said SU police department needs to monitor the areas more frequently and become more forceful when comes to enforcing parking regulations.
Dale Flowers, SUPD chief, said his staff has been working diligently to ensure faculty has their reserved spaces.
“Parking itself is a problem not just for Southern University, it’s a problem for universities throughout the country. What we have done is outline a parking area for faculty and staff and just this semester, we have probably written more tickets in that faculty area than we have in quite a while to get those students out.”
Flowers said SUPD officers have been working an extra four hours daily just to concentrate on writing tickets.
“If you are illegally parked you are going to get a ticket, that has not changed,” Flowers said. “I think we’ve got more than adequate parking for faculty. I think the problem with the faculty area is the students are parking in that area as if it’s student parking and what we are doing to address it is to get those student out of that area.”
Flowers said SUPD was not going out to target faculty, but if they are illegally parked or in violation of parking procedures they would be ticketed.
Bookstore employees have also complained that faculty and students are filling their designated area. Bookstore manager Lucy Green declined to comment on the record.
“I have personally gone over to the bookstore area and written tickets,” Flowers said. “I did ticket some cars in that area but it was no where as much as I was told. I was told that there were a bunch of students parked in there, but every day I have gone, it has been faculty parked there. I have not written one student for parking in the area designated for the bookstore.”