Madison Kwiecinski 

News Editor 

Mvk5945@psu.edu 

Earlier this year, the parking situation on-campus became a contentious issue within the Penn State Behrend student body, as students believed not enough parking was available, especially when compared with the rates in which they pay for parking passes. Behrend has a large number of commuter students, and earlier this year, many residential students began parking in commuter lots, taking up the available spaces. 

The issue of parking on-campus is a recurring topic of discussion across many college campuses. Students pay large rates to park at the place in which they live or go to school, but are often limited on when and where they can park.

Additionally,  a large portion of students choose not to buy parking passes as well, which further complicates the issue because the school does not, and is not expected to, account for spaces for students without parking passes to park. However, all of these students still do park on-campus, therefore taking away spaces from the students who actually paid to be here. 

In an interview from earlier this year, former SGA head of Student Affairs, and next year’s SGA President, Matt Strup states, “Then the bigger issue in my opinion is the amount of students that I have heard that either don’t have a parking pass this semester, or have never bought one in their entirety of being here,” he continued, “This makes it harder for students who need to park in those lots, such as the ones closer to the dorms. For the people who don’t have a parking pass at all, this affects every student in a few different ways.”

Throughout the course of this year, there seems to have been a general increase in ticketing on-campus, a solution SGA mentioned in the fall. An increase in ticketing, especially for those without a parking pass, helps to offset the cost of those students who refused to purchase one. Also, according to the Parking FAQ listed on the Penn State Behrend website, the money generated from selling student, faculty, and staff parking permits is used to construct new parking lots, maintain the existing ones, and administer the parking programs. The money generated specifically from parking tickets goes to SGA, and is then allocated to student clubs and organizations throughout the year. 

Tickets have been the solution that is in place for as long as most people can remember on-campus, and yet students still voice concern about the lack of parking. Therefore, SGA recently found a more creative trial program to potentially resolve the parking issue on-campus. 

Dylan Free, the current SGA President recently informed the paper of the new trial program, which hopefully will be fully implemented by the fall. Dr. Kurzweg and Randy Geering were both instrumental in the implementation of the program and worked with SGA on the project. 

This new program focuses specifically on altering which students are able to park in the AMIC  lot, a parking lot which has been controversial since it opened. The AMIC lot is not used to its fullest capacity, because parking spots are set aside for potential businesses who want to move into knowledge park as well as for staff, with student parking typically being unavailable. 

According to a written statement by Dylan Free on the matter, “The basis for this new program is that students who currently work in AMIC for the School of Engineering through a TA or paid researcher role will be given the opportunity to park in the AMIC lot.” In theory, the program will have those students purchase student parking passes as they typically would, but instead of being given student parking passes they would receive a faculty/staff parking pass instead. A faculty pass will allow those students to park in AMIC, and should, in theory, open up spots in the Burke parking deck as the abovementioned students would no longer need to park there. 

This program was set to begin after spring break, and start with a small number of students in order to first work out how Operations would process the new parking passes in their system. Hopefully, in the fall of 2022, we will see the new SGA parking resolution fully implemented.