Lot(s) More Student Parking This Fall
They agreed to help. Three groups of students took a look at the three different approaches to parking that Facilities Management has been pondering: parking decks, busing from remote sites, and surface parking. And the surface parking group presented a plan that would add more than 100 new parking places for students. "During the last week of classes I was really busy, but I spent about four hours listening to the students' presentation," Blumhardt said. "I figure that was the best investment of my time I could have made that week." Blumhardt was so impressed with their idea that he implemented it this summer. The newly created Lot 34, by the waterfront, provides parking for fifty graduate students. An additional sixty student commuter parking spots have been added near St. Albert the Great University Parish. And twenty new spaces have been added in Lot 8, for grad students. The 130 new spaces are all set to go this fall, including blacktop and signage. When the parents of today's MTU students were going to college, they rarely had cars. "When I was at Tech, we would all pile into a vehicle, and we didn't even know whose it was," recalls Residential Services Director John Rovano. "Now students ask, 'Whose car are we taking?'" About 60 percent of first-year students bring a vehicle to campus, a figure that isn't expected to get any lower. And with both students and student recruiters aghast at the prospect of limiting the number of cars hall dwellers could have on campus, Residential Services had a problem. "So we started looking at alternatives," Rovano said. "The cost of building a parking deck is astronomical; we couldn't pass that on to the students. But with all the talk of It turns out that local businessman Ed Manninen was interested in building a lot for MTU students to use on Paradise Road, in Portage Township. "It's not for students who need to use their cars daily," Rovano said. "But many students bring their vehicles up here and don't use them until they drive back home at Thanksgiving, except for the occasional Copper Country cruise." Thus, he doesn't anticipate that the lot will cause a significant increase in traffic on Paradise Road, except maybe during the beginning and end of terms and breaks. "This isn't a lot where students will be coming and going on a daily basis," he said. "They live on campus, their meals are here, their rooms are here, and they work here." Manninen has also renovated an old radio station at the parking lot site into a three-bedroom bungalow. "Three students will live there and be parking lot assistants," Rovano said. "That will provide some security. And a phone will be available there, for students who need to call for a ride back to the hall." The lot will have space for about 400 vehicles and will be ready in the fall. Students won't have to pay any extra to use the lot; the cost of the lease will be absorbed by Residential Services and paid for out of the usual room-and-board fees.
Last year, faced with a fast-growing need for parking and even faster-growing resentment at the thought of having to pay for it, Facilities Management Director Bill Blumhardt asked Associate Professor Bill Sproule for help. Could his civil engineering senior design class have a go at the University's parking problem?
outsourcing this and that service, we thought maybe we could consider outsourcing parking."