Interview with Ryan Greene, Manager of Parking & Transportation at Georgia College

Here at Georgia College, we have one department that oversees both parking services, parking enforcement, and parking allocation and maintenance, as well as all of transportation. On the parking side, we oversee all of our parking lots. We have approximately 40 surface parking lots. None of those lots have any parking garages, and we don't have any gated parking lots. We just have surface street lots that students, employees, faculty and staff are allowed to park in, based on the parking permit that we give them. We oversee those actual lots.

What that entails, is making sure, that the right individuals are parking in the correct lots. It's making sure that only Georgia College community members, people who are part of Georgia College, are parking in our lot, unless they are visitors or someone who is here for Georgia College purposes. Also, we make sure we are utilizing those parking spaces as best as possible. The enforcement piece, of course, involves issuing citations when necessary.

We also oversee any reserved parking or visitor parking. If people have events on campus and they need to be able to park, our office works directly with other areas on campus to make sure they do have somewhere to park once they get here.

Besides the enforcement, we also work on any kind of maintenance. We oversee the maintenance piece of the parking lot, whether that is resurfacing, resealing, restriping, repainting and all kinds of things like that.

The other side of our department is transportation. We have about 10-15 shuttles that we utilize on a regular basis. The main priority of those shuttles is to transport students, faculty, staff and employees from our west campus area, to our central campus area, to our main campus. We have three primary campuses, all within a few miles, so not very far from one another. Still, we like to be able to transport individuals when necessary to make sure they can get where they need to be. That's the main priority for our transportation system.

The secondary priority is to transport our athletic teams to away events.

If you are talking about undergraduate students, I think we are right around 5500 to 6000 and then we have a little under a 1,000 of our graduate students.

Right. With the most recent parking space inventory that we had back in January of this year, so it's not very old, it looks like we have about 3,500 parking spaces.

Of course, we have a number of commuter students, so they are coming during certain times throughout the day, maybe just for a few hours of class. We also have a number of resident students. That's one of our other classifications of students, who live on campus, whether that be our residence halls or our apartments on campus. Then, of course, we have employees and staff who are working here on a day-to-day basis, usually 8 to 5.

I used to be a student here. I graduated in 2009. If you ask a student and if you ask an employee, some might say we have a parking challenge on campus. Really, what that is, is a challenge of convenient parking. When it comes to the number of spaces, we really do have enough for people to park in. We have a few outside perimeter lots.

We actually call them perimeter lots and they are not right in the heart of campus, they are a little bit on the outskirts and those are almost always available. I don't think we ever have complete maximum where everyone is maxed out when it comes to parking. For the most part, if you ever need to find a parking space, we have one for you on our campus. It just might not be the most convenient place for you.

In order to make things a little more convenient, we have our dedicated shuttle service during the week. Every eight minutes, we have a shuttle that comes by to those perimeter lots. If you were to park your car there, you could easily leave it throughout the day and take one of our shuttles to campus, which isn't a long ride at all.

Yes, it's not the ideal solution. It's one thing for employees, like me, as we pretty much know what our schedule is. For the most part, somewhere around 8 to 5. It might be a little easier for an employee to be able to depend on our transportation system, which is a very dependable system. If I get in at 7:45 in that lot, I can guarantee that by 7:50 or 7:55, I'll be in my office without a parking challenge. But, when it comes to students, they have classes throughout the day; they are on and off campus all the time; they are going to meetings; they are going to lunch; they are going back to their apartment; or they are going to their residence hall, or wherever it might be.

With that, it's a little more challenging because they are going back and forth so many times, on and off campus, so having to go to one of those outside lots is a little bit more challenging. It's still a solution that we provide, but it's not ideal for them. Of course, like most people, they would want a parking lot that is two feet away from the door of their next classroom.

My current boss, he is actually the Director of the Operations, for Auxiliary Services. Parking and transportation is underneath Auxiliary Services, here at Georgia College. In some universities, parking and transportation services falls underneath Public Safety or their police department. We do not. We are under Auxiliary Services.

With that being said, he oversees the operations side and I report up through him. He was actually in this position prior to me getting here. What I'm getting at, to answer your question, is that back about six or seven years ago, when we moved Parking and Transportation from Public Safety to Auxiliary Services, fines and citation amounts were determined at that time.

For the most part, they were determined based on looking at other fees that were in force throughout the state of Georgia. They looked at some comparable universities that were around our size and around our location. They looked at the demographic area and said, 'What makes sense and is fair, compared to other universities? How should we set our fee structure?' I think the fees we have right now, are fair.

Looking at numbers here, it looks like we have 95 handicapped parking spaces across the campus. The majority of those handicapped spaces have been here for quite some time. Any time we build a new lot, we work with the rules and regulations that are in place to make sure that we are giving enough ADA spaces that are necessary. Basically, just dividing up the total number of parking spaces that are available in that lot, and not dividing, but calculating, the number of spaces in that lot and then saying, 'We need X number of handicapped spaces to accommodate.' I don't know the exact number, off the top of my head, of percentages.

But we definitely fall within code to make sure we are more than comparable and to make sure we do a good job to have enough ADA and handicapped spaces. I think, for the most part, in the majority of our parking lots, we might have one or two extra ones, just to make sure we are safe and helping the needs of individuals who need that.

We definitely separate it out. We separate it out by employees, both part-time and full-time, and commuter classification, which is anybody who is commuting to campus and it basically just means that you live off campus. There are a number of off-campus options, which are not owned by the University and owned by private companies, but still, if you do not live on our campus, then you get a commuter pass. There is also resident parking, which means that you are an actual resident of Georgia College and you are living in one of our resident halls or apartment complexes on campus.

We don't find that very often. Every now and again, we have had a few keyed cars, but that doesn't happen a lot either. We have cameras, and 95% to 98% of our parking lots on campus have at least one camera, if not multiple cameras in those lots. We do a really good job of making sure our lots are safe, when it comes to cameras and lighting.

We work on that, on a regular basis, and we make sure if there are any complaints from students, faculty or staff, that those are addressed as quickly as possible. Georgia College was actually named one of the safest campuses in the United States, a few years ago.

It's a very safe campus and part of the reason why that is, is because we do have a number of cameras and lights. The area where Georgia College is, in the downtown area of Milledgeville, is a very happening place. When it comes down to it, it's not a very dark area in terms of the lighting, so there is not as much opportunity for theft and things like that.

We do have signs that are spread throughout the campus. I would not say that there is a sign in every single parking lot though.

Yes. The first piece that I would like to say is that students are paying for their parking, to be honest. They are paying for parking and they are paying for the transportation of shuttles. Some revenue has to come from our department and it comes from a fee. The students pay a fee, every semester. That fee is specific to Georgia College. They pay that so they can park on campus and so they can use our shuttles whenever necessary.

Employees don't pay a fee, but they pay a permit fee. They buy their permit, every single year, so they can park on campus. For employees, we do have the availability if you would like to park in our perimeter parking space on the outside lots, you actually don't have to pay for parking.

In terms of putting a dollar sign on each parking space, it would be interesting to see how that would work. Generally speaking, students have more challenges when it comes to finances, then our employees. I think you would find that employees would be willing to pay a little more if they could guarantee that they are going to have a parking space.

We have some employees on campus who have reserved parking. Not many, it's at a premium, in terms of cost. In order to get that approval, it has to go up through a few vice presidents. It's a big deal to get a reserved space on this campus. But, if you compare that directly to your question, which is basically saying, 'If I could almost guarantee that I could always have a parking space and I'm going to pay money for it every single day, would people do it?' and I think for some employees, you might find some that would be willing, but for students, not so much.

Yes, that's a good point. The maintenance piece definitely plays a huge role. We spend thousands and thousands of dollars every year making sure our parking lots are looking as good as possible. I think part of the argument from students might be, 'Is the parking and transportation department being the most efficient? If you say it's $400 a parking space, where did you get that number? Could you not be spending a little less money to still give me parking, blah, blah, blah.' I think it's a good point and it could be argued that maybe they would be a little more appreciative.

The only thing I could compare that to is research done in the past on the most recent price for a parking space in a parking garage. Like I said, we don't have any parking garages on campus. Just looking at the research, just for fun, it is shows that one space in a parking garage, when it comes down to the cost of the actual garage itself, not even the ongoing maintenance, but the initial cost, is upwards to $20,000 to $22,000, some people even say $25,000+ for one space. The price is gigantic for a parking garage to be built. Of course, it's less expensive for surface streets, but when you compare it that way, it's interesting statistics.

It depends. We have almost 40 surface lots, so we have a lot of different lots that we have to accommodate. Some of those lots have as few as 10 parking spaces, some of them have hundreds. We look at the ones that need them the most. Some lots are utilized less often. For example, we have one lot that has hundreds of parking spaces, but it's not utilized that often. It's up there a few blocks away from where people would like to park. They could park and walk to the main campus, but it would be a few blocks and of course, sometimes they would prefer not to do that, especially in the hot Georgia weather.

As I said, we do provide those shuttles that go around that lot to pick up students, faculty and staff, but with that being said, the lot is utilized less often. We wouldn't repaint those lines as much as a lot that is utilized at almost 100% capacity every single day, because it's right there on campus. Depending on how much the lot is used, is really determining how often we might do maintenance on a lot. I would say, on average, every few years. Every two to three years we try to look at each specific lot and see if it needs to be repainted or resealed or repaved, or if there are pot holes or that kind of thing.

Every single year, we do a general look over all lots on campus and say, 'We have 'X' number of dollars that we can allocate towards maintenance this year. Let's address the top priorities,' and needless to say, if we have lots that were completely unusable or had huge pot holes, we would make that a priority and go ahead and get that done. The lots that we don't get to every single year, it doesn't mean they aren't usable at all; they are still in very good shape. It's just a matter of, 'Can it wait another year, or does it have to be done right now?'

Anybody who wants to park on our campus needs to have a permit. The only exception to that is a visitor. If you are a visitor to our campus, we would ask that you get in touch with whoever you are going to visit. For instance, if you are working with someone in our English department and you are coming for the day, we would ask that the individual from the English department contact our department, in parking, and we would issue a visitor parking pass. Then they could have that, so we wouldn't ticket them.

As you know, while our campus parking lots are often most utilized for our specific venues on campus, we are, sort of, in the heart of the downtown area and from time to time, we might have individuals who want to go eat at a restaurant downtown and since one of our lots is pretty close, they could go park there instead, and that's what we don't want.

Our students, faculty and staff are paying for permits and they are paying fees to make sure we utilize those spaces as best as possible. That's part of the reason why we make sure that every single individual who parks on our campus does have a parking permit, whether you are an employee or whether you are a student who is living off or on campus.

In terms of the program itself, I mentioned that we have employee, commuter, resident and perimeter set classifications, if you will, of individuals. In the summer, we target our freshmen who are coming in. Since it is a new process for them to be on campus and park a car on campus, we reach out to them prior to them coming to campus.

We send them some mail pieces and some emails to ask them to register for a permit. They can register online for that permit. Once they get to campus, usually during their orientation, which is when they come and sit down with their parents and talk about the classes they are going to have, all the ins and outs, what's on our campus, and what services we provide. During those orientations in the summer, we are passing out those permits to the correct individuals, as they registered online.

We utilize T2, which is a parking software system and company. We enjoy working with them a lot. They do a really great job. They make things pretty easy for us; great customer service. With that being said, we get all the students on campus and the employees on campus to come through a system called Banner and once they are through the Registrar's Office, they are entered into that system. Once they apply to be a student and they enroll and once the employees are on campus, then they come through that system and they pretty much automatically go into our parking software system.

If they are going to park on campus, we assign a permit number to them and then they hang those permits in their cars. We have hang-tag permits, we don't have stickers. We had those, at one point, but they got a little annoying so we went with hang-tag permits instead. Every single year, we ask that students get a new parking permit for the year. They do expire right before the new school year begins. We mainly do that so we have the correct car information on those individuals. For our employees, if they'd like to, they can come and get a new permit every year, but we have an option where they can get one permit and keep that hang-tag in their car, as long as they are an employee for our campus.

Employees do have the option to pay for a permit, every single year, through payroll deduction out of their paychecks. They don't have to go through the hassle of getting another parking permit. But every student does have to get a new parking permit, each year. We issue those parking permits to students, faculty and staff at the beginning of the year. They have them throughout the year.

It's no hassle after that, as long as they are parking in the parking lot they are directly assigned and they aren't parking in fire lanes or on yellow warning curbs or anything like that; they don't get any parking citations. From time to time, especially when you are running late for class or something like that and parking is at the highest demand of the day, that's when you will have to work with the enforcement of the lots.

We don't. We have a specific seal that is printed through the vendor that we work with to get those parking permits made. A specific seal on there that can't be duplicated and we do not have issues. They are hard plastic and to be honest, it would be somewhat impressive to have them duplicated because it would be pretty hard to do. We don't have that issue.

As for enforcing the lots, we enforce Monday through Friday, 8 in the morning until 5 in the evening. That's our general enforcement time. Technically, we don't really broadcast it, but if somebody wants to park in one of our lots, after 5:00, they can. Let's say a commuter student had a class at 5:30 in the evening and they wanted to park in the employee lot or they want to go park in the resident lot, we would not be out there to issue tickets for them. Between 8 and 5 though, we will be out there. Almost all day long, we have somebody on the lots.

Of course, they aren't in every lot, at all times, but they are somewhere on the lot looking to see that people are in the correct lot; making sure that they have valid permits and making sure that they are not parking in a handicapped space when they are not supposed to, or in fire lanes. If it's after 5:00 and someone is parked in a handicapped spot and they are not actually handicapped or have correct identification to be handicapped, or if they are parked in a fire lane, up on a curb, across multiple spaces, anything that is a hazard or dangerous to traffic flow, then our Public Safety department can intervene if necessary and issue a citation.

We do have student workers that work for us, up until 10:00 in the evening, Mondays through Thursday and up until 7:00 on Friday. Periodically, they will go out after 5:00 and, if necessary, enforce what I just mentioned to make sure that people are parking legally. Not necessarily in the lot that they have to park in, but making sure that it is not a hazard in any way to the flow of traffic. If they were to park in a spot that they weren't supposed to park in, like a commuter was parked in a resident spot, or something like that, they could technically do it after 5:00 and not get a ticket, but first thing at 8:00 the next morning we will be enforcing and if they are not in the correct space, they would get a ticket.

TThe revenue we bring in for our ticket fines is not that high when it comes to the total revenue we bring in as a department.

Most of our money is coming in directly from the student fees that are paid each semester, by students and also by employees that are paying for parking permits. That's where the majority of our revenue comes in and then we also have a lot of revenue that comes in from our chartering. Like I said, if we take our baseball team to an event in South Carolina, then there is a fee, of course, for the utilization of our shuttle, our drivers and all of our services.

Those are, our biggest areas of revenue. When it comes to citations, it's not very high at all. It's really a very small percentage. The main reason we do enforcement parking on our lots is for the safety, to make sure the flow of traffic is the way it's supposed to be. Also, to make sure that people are utilizing the lots they are supposed to be utilizing; making sure it's as fair as possible and that we don't have any non-Georgia College individuals parking on our lots.

Yes. It's a good point to bring up. I will say a few years ago the revenue we brought in from parking tickets and citations was a little higher than it is now. It has actually gone down over the last three years. We don't depend on that money to operate as a department. We don't say that we have to go out there and put five more people on the lot to reach our quota. We don't have quotas. We make what we make and to be honest, it helps out a good bit. If people are Good Samaritans in their parking lots, like they are supposed to be, it's better for everybody. Like I said, we aren't dependent on that revenue to operate our department and we don't want to put out students and employees and make them upset with us, if we don't have to.

Haha yes, right.

Oh Yes. We definitely have that. When it comes to our shuttle drivers, there is no way they are doing that. They're not supposed to be utilizing their personal cell phones while driving, period. There is no answering the phone. They do hit shuttle stops throughout the day, of course, and they stop for three or four minutes here or there and sometimes a little bit longer depending on which stop they're at, to pick up students or take a quick break to use the restroom, things like that. We don't mind if they utilize communication devices, at that time, as long as the bus is not in motion, it is properly parked and everything is safe. That's OK with us. But in terms of while they're in the driver's seat, actually operating the vehicle, no way. That's definitely a policy that we enforce.

That's a great question. We just did a study a couple of months ago on how many different bike spaces we have on campus. It looks like we have a little over 400 spaces for bikes on our campus. Seems like a pretty high number. To be honest, they're not utilized to the highest extent but they are, on your main campus where a lot of your core classes are, you'll see bike racks that are utilized all the time. We are ever growing the number of bike racks that we have. We see the demand, especially in those high areas where there is a lot of classes that we do see bikes utilized all the time.

We do issue permits for bicycles. There is no additional charge. It's actually the same system, T2; we use for bicycle permits. We use the same permit number that the individual might use for their car, if they have a car, and print that out in a sticky form and they put that on their bicycle. Then we have a record of that bicycle being theirs so if it was parked in an illegal way or impeding the flow of pedestrian traffic or automobile traffic, we would have to get that moved, and we would contact them directly.

If a bicycle was to be stolen, for whatever reason, and our Public Safety department or our department was to find that bicycle, then we would be able to contact the owner to make sure that they knew that we had it. We do recommend students go through that process. It's actually a new process that we just implemented. We've had it sort of informally over the last few years, but it's a more formal process now starting this past August, where we communicated out and we are still in the process of communicating out to students or employees.

If you have a bike, please come to our office so that we can track that. We don't issue tickets for bikes, by any means. It's not a way for us to make money. That's not the purpose. The purpose is to be able to keep track of them in our system so that mainly, if it's stolen, we can figure out who it belongs to, if it is recovered.

We really try to do that and more and more bikes are coming on campus, especially with being more sustainable. It's a thing we recognize as possible so we're trying to become an official bicycle-friendly campus.