USC raises parking fees for faculty, staff; students next?

The University of South Carolina plans to raise parking permit fees for faculty and staff to pay for more than $12.5 million in improvements to the downtown campus’ surface parking lots and parking garages.

The college’s trustees will decide next month whether to raise parking permit fees for students as well, spokesman Jeff Stensland said.

The fees will pay to repaint lines; install lighting, more cameras, and emergency call boxes; repave asphalt; fill potholes and make other structural fixes needed at the school’s surface lots and parking garages.

“We’ve heard from people who park on campus that they feel the condition of many of the surface lots can be improved,” Stensland said. “We agree. We just haven’t had the funds to do it.”

Stensland said USC typically has made fixes as needed but that there was plenty of deferred maintenance. The fee hikes will pay for improvements at every USC lot, he said.

Faculty and staff who previously didn’t pay for parking permits soon will pay $12 or $20 a month. Other permits for faculty and staff will rise $5 or $10 a month. The hikes depend on the permit type.

Fees also went up “slightly” for parking garages in 2014, Stensland said. The permit fees are the USC parking division’s only source of funding.

Faculty and staff learned of the changes near the end of the spring semester.

“It’s not unexpected. They’ve been reducing parking spaces. It’s an urban campus,” said Doug Fisher, a senior instructor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. “You look at places like the University of Texas – people park on the outside of campus and use the mass-transit system.

“The problem here is that USC mass-transit system is not good. They need to take some of this money and use it for that.”

USC has promised to unroll a “host of improvements” to its free shuttle system this fall, but those won’t be paid for by parking fees, Stensland said. Plans call for better routes with more stops, more park-and-ride choices and more evening shuttle options, he said.

This story was originally published May 29, 2016 at 10:35 PM with the headline "USC raises parking fees for faculty, staff; students next?."