City, campus collaborate on parking situation

      Several months after the city of Milledgeville changed the parking policy on Hancock Street and Wilkinson street to two-hour parking during the busiest times of the day, the city has come forth with financial reasons for making their decision.
     The city states that cars remaining stagnant in the same spot for sometimes days on end hurt local businesses, and deprived the city millions of dollars in revenue each year.
     The change was met with contention by many students, some of whom believed the policy was put into effect directly to hurt the student body.  The city of Milledgeville insists this is not the case.
     Heather Holder, the executive director of Downtown   Development in Milledgeville, stated that the changes were put into place in order to combat vehicles that remained in one spot all day, overnight and, in some cases, weeks.
     “After a considerable study by the Downtown Development Authority it was determined that an overwhelming majority of the cars on these streets never changed,” Holder said in an e-mail.  “Public parking is intended to be shared throughout the day … the goal is for every space to turn over five times every day.”
     The primary reason the changes were implemented was a financial one, as the rotation of parking places enables more customers to park near the businesses downtown.  According to Holder, the changes to the parking system will allow the businesses, and the economy of Milledgeville, to flourish.
     “Every parking space downtown brings an average of $20 per car,” Holder said.  “If we are successful in achieving the five car turn over rate we would bring in $100 per car a day to the district, multiply that times 365 days in a year and that brings a low estimate of $35,000 dollars per spot each year.  If you multiply that number by the amount of spaces that were changed, 118, that translates into 4.13 million dollars of annual revenue to the downtown business.”
     Cars remaining in the same space for days on in would hurt the businesses downtown, and deprive the city of as much as 4.13 million dollars every year.
     Students are welcome to use the spaces while shopping, or while they are in class, as long as they observe the parking restrictions.
     “We don’t mind students using the parking spaces to go to class,” Holder said, “as long as they can get back in a two-hour time frame.”
     Greg Brown, manager of Parking and Transportation Services at GCSU, said he had heard about parking issues from the City over a year before the changes were implemented.
     “We knew the change was going to happen and had met with Heather,” Brown said. “But we were unsure exactly when the change was going to take place. We were told it was going to take place this year and then became unsure after various reports. The problem came in a lack of notification and communication.”
     Brown explained that he didn’t know all the particulars of the changes to the city parking system, but he did know a change was coming.
     “I feel like the city took the University into consideration,” Brown said.
     Holder agrees, and wrote that “the city acted in the best interests of the merchants and the University.”
     Though the city changed the parking, both parties were consulted on the change and lines of what was communicated and what was not communicated seem different on both sides.
     For many students, who may not have time between classes to move to a new parking place, the two-hour time frame may seem impossible to work around. The enforced hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., are also the busiest and when the spaces are in the highest demand.
     However, Brown assures the students they are working to help ease the strain on parking.
     “We are working on better parking allotments and more accurate shuttle runs,” Brown said.
     The problems of parking will continue to be an issue, but Holder and Brown agree that good communication between the city and  GCSU will help find a happy medium for everyone.
     “Communication may have seemed a problem this time,” Holder said,  "but efforts will be put forward to fix that in the future.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 12 2007. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry