Paying for Parking that Doesn’t Exist
Students are used to dealing with parking struggles around campus, weighing the pros and cons between paying hundreds of dollars to fight for a parking spot every day or relying on Uber to get them to the grocery store every week.
However faculty and staff at the school are faced with similar struggles — whether they want to pay to park their car at their job or rely on public transportation every day.
Faculty and staff receive a multitude of benefits, such as health insurance, dental insurance and tuition credit. Parking, however, is not included. In fact, unless you have been a faculty or staff member for 20 years or longer, paying for a parking pass inevitable.
For a general parking pass for a semester, faculty pay only $12.00 less than the student parking rate, either $341.00 for a surface parking spot and $398.00 for a spot in the underground garage. In addition, there is the daily cost of gas to factor in.
“It seems pretty ridiculous that teachers and staff have to pay hundreds of dollars to park at their place of work,” said James Luskin, a senior at Catholic University.
Parking anywhere in the city is going to cost money, no matter where the job is located. An advantage to using a pass administered by the University is that the payment can be taken directly out of their paychecks, creating one less thing to keep track of.
“While the prices might be higher than one would hope for, one of the benefits of being faculty or staff is that the payment for parking space can be taken out monthly from our paycheck as opposed to students who unfortunately cannot do this,” said Victor David, Scheduling Coordinator for Pryzbyla Management at the University. “I think that is where we can improve the system for student parking.”
While some view the parking pass prices as a bit extreme, it actually ends up being cheaper than many other options.
The Rhode Island Row apartments offer covered parking for $65.00 a month, which is about $140.00 cheaper than a Catholic University semester parking pass.
Emily Scanlon, Program Coordinator for Office of Campus Activities, who began working here at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year, sees the ability to purchase a parking pass, which can be paid for through a portion of her monthly paycheck, as an advantage to the job.
“I was thankful CUA gave me the option to buy a parking pass on campus,” said Scanlon. “I love the Metro but the overall cost and commute time is less with my CUA parking pass.”
There are pros and cons to both sides. For some, the parking permit situation is bearable, while others deem it unfair to pay staff and then take a portion of the money back. Overall, given the conflicting opinions, the parking situation on campus would not suffer from some re-structuring.
