Parking is already a nightmare for anyone when it’s free, so is it fair for Winthrop Police to charge such high rates for it during this financially crushing COVID-19 era?
Aside from the standard links, the Campus Police website has three subpages: Clery Act (government-enforced information transparency), General Safety Tips, and Parking Enforcement. Registering your vehicle costs $100 whether you are a resident or commuter, so if you have a car for all four years that is $400 — not including parking fines, but let’s get to that a little later.
As of the past few years, Winthrop’s combined undergraduate and graduate student body has totaled around 6,000. Making a conservative estimate let’s suppose 1 out of 4 students pay to register their vehicles. That is about 1,500 registered vehicles, meaning by those numbers Campus Police collects around $150,000 in registration fees.
With just about everyone learning remotely last semester and many classes still being online this semester, one might think that the registration fees would be slightly less. Students living off-campus have to drive into campus and get ticketed face a $110 fine, with one alternative: register their vehicle for $100. Each subsequent time accrues an additional $110 fine, and registered vehicles parked in spots not allotted to them will get a $40 fine.
Resident student parking spots are mainly located near Richardson and Wofford, with the Cherry Road parking lot an additional block away down the main road. Besides these, only a scanty few spaces are placed near any of the other dorm halls.
Commuter students, despite paying the same fee as residents, have even fewer spaces to choose from: either across Oakland Avenue near Dinkins and the Ida Jane Dacus library, or on the Cherry Road lot. Without a disability parking permit, this means that those commuting by car to most classrooms have a solid ten to fifteen-minute walk, including crossing a usually busy road at least once.
So, where does all the money from registration and fines go? The Campus Police website is not so clear on that topic. Officer salaries come straight from the university, and most statements have indicated that the money goes towards maintenance and upkeep.
If we take our estimated vehicle registration income from earlier (and not including parking citations), some things the money could be used for are repairing about 750 potholes, repainting 350 parking lots (or 15,000 parking spaces), or paving a brand new 25,000 square foot parking lot — every year.
Alternatively, Winthrop’s Campus Police could give each of their 16 employees a bonus of about $9,375. For perspective, full-time officers get a salary of approximately $35,000 a year, just barely hovering over minimum wage. On the other hand, a government listing for the university Chief of Police’s salary sits between $60,344 and $111,646 annually.
According to their website, on average there are 1.5 officers on duty during any given shift, with a total of six patrol officers on the payroll. Compare this to two full time parking enforcement officers, so on any given day there is at best one more officer working to keep students safe than there are officers working to issue them fines.
This issue of safety shows. In a survey by College Factual of about 4,000 colleges and universities, 3,000 of them reported fewer incidents. Another evaluation website, American School Search gave the university’s campus police a D- rating based on government data, concluding “Winthrop University is a very dangerous place to study.”
This leaves us asking, which is a higher priority to campus police and the university: our safety, or our money? And where is it all going?
Photo by Jamia Johnson
