Courtesy of David Bradley, Vice President for Administration and Finance

As a very urban campus with a large number of faculty and staff serving a large number of students, providing sufficient parking has been an ongoing challenge at UHD. Addressing parking deficiencies has been a focus of recent facilities master planning work, and an offshoot of that was the creation in Fall 2011 of a UHD Parking and Transportation Advisory Committee (PTAC). That group, comprised of staff, faculty and students, met several times last fall to discuss a range of parking and transportation issues facing the university.

Among those issues were the need for additional parking capacity to meet existing student demand and the need for new faculty/staff parking due to aging infrastructure. We are now working on where a new student parking garage should be located, as well as a plan for replacement of the existing One Main Building (OMB) faculty/staff garage.

One year from now, in the summer of 2013, the existing OMB Faculty/Staff Garage will be demolished to make room for a replacement garage. In the course of this project the university community will be inconvenienced, but as with any renovation or construction project the benefit will ultimately outweigh the inconvenience we'll experience.

Some general information about the OMB Faculty/Staff Garage Project:

Project Timeline

Summer 2013 through Summer 2014. The expectation is that the new garage will be ready for occupancy in time for Fall 2014.

• When the existing Faculty/Staff Garage is taken out of service, the 'Gold Level' parking on Floor 2 of the One Main Building will be eliminated.

• Current Gold Level permit holders will not automatically be provided with a replacement reserved space.

Replacement Parking During Construction

• UHD is in discussions to lease a nearby surface lot which would provide at least as many spaces as are being lost.
• During the construction period the Academic Building Garage parking will remain operational.
• Visitor Parking will remain where it is.
• There will be 112 spaces available on P2 and P3 of the Academic Building Garage.

1. A number of these reserved spaces are assigned per protocol (currently under review).
2. The balance of reserved spaces will be made available through a lottery. More detail on this will be provided in the coming days.

Parking Rates Increase

To fund the construction of the replacement Faculty/Staff Garage parking rates will be increased for FY2013.

The changes to faculty/staff rates will be as follows:

• Reserved/Covered (Full Year) - from $190 to $320
• Reserved/Uncovered - Commerce Street Building (Full Year) - from $135 to $250
• General/Unreserved (Full Year) - from $85 to $200
• General/Adjunct (Semester) - from $10 to $25
• Motorcycle (Full Year) - from $24 to $50

The payroll deduction option will be changed to allow 12 monthly charges as opposed to the 3-payment plan now in place.

Other Information on Parking

• Employees with 30 years of service will continue to receive free parking, but only with a General/Unreserved space.
• 30-year employees wishing to have a reserved space will be able to enter the lottery.
• Any 30-year employee awarded a reserved space through the lottery will be required to pay the $120 differential between the price of a Reserved/Covered space ($320) and the value of the General/Unreserved space ($200).

Recognizing the impact of these increases on employees, the University will be allocating a portion of the one-time stipend funds set aside during FY2013 budget development to provide a 'Basic' stipend of $400 to all full-time employees, with a pro rata stipend going to qualifying part-time employees. For most employees this stipend will cover any parking rate increase and the recently announced increase in group health insurance premiums. This matter was addressed in a memo sent last week from Ivonne Montalbano to the university community.

Additional detail on the lottery will be provided soon. As more information becomes available about the replacement parking that will be used during the construction period it will be shared. Note that the construction phase of this project will not occur for another ten months.