By Amy Taylor
Trevecca administration might start charging students to park their cars on campus.
“We are out of parking on this campus,” David Caldwell, executive vice president for administration and finance, said.
The long-term solution to this problem is to build a parking garage, Caldwell said. And administration is trying to find ways to save money in order to build a garage.
“[The cost of a parking garage] is a lot of money; it’s money we don’t have,” Caldwell said. “If we’re going to build a parking garage, we need to start saving money.”
Each parking space in a garage would cost the university between 10 and 20 thousand dollars adding up to about $4.5 million.
Administration does not want to cover any more land than is already covered, Caldwell said.
“The goal is to not cover up any more grass with parking,” he said.
In order to reach this long-term solution, administration is looking into charging undergraduate students with cars $150 per semester, but so far “numbers are preliminary,” Caldwell said in an email.
Fees for students in graduate programs might be different, though, depending on how many days a week they are on campus.
“If they only attend classes one day a week, it might be $35,” Caldwell said in an email.
Administration is also looking into having rental cars on campus for students to rent by the hour, Caldwell said.
Although some universities do not allow freshman to bring their cars to school, Trevecca administration is trying to stray away from this because they know some students need their cars to travel to and from home, he said.
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” Caldwell said. “That could be something we could do,” but it would be “a hardship on students.”
Although all of the plans for the fees are still in the works and administration does not know much yet, Caldwell said that they will “try to build a facility that will accommodate the university.”
In the meantime, all the parking by the Adam’s Administration Building should be usable again by May before graduation.
