Many seniors are feeling less at home in their woodframe houses recently, after Public Safety (PSafe) issued a number of $20 tickets to students who had parked unregistered vehicles in driveways. Unregistered cars that were parked on the street, which is under the jurisdiction of Middletown police, were not ticketed.
Nick Benacerraf ’08, who lives in a woodframe on Fountain Ave., had already purchased a registration sticker and was meaning to put it on his vehicle, he said, when he received a ticket.
“I had bought a parking sticker but hadn’t put it on yet, and I had parked my car in the driveway and saw that it had a ticket on it one morning,” he said. “I don’t think it’s necessary to preemptively enforce concerns like this.”
Two residents of 40 Fountain Ave., Keera Bhandari ’08 and Becca Feiden ’08, also found themselves facing fines. Feiden agreed with Benacerraf that the penalty seemed to have come before any warning.
“The ridiculous part is that there’s no sign that says you need a tag,” she said. “Nobody knows that you need a tag.”
Bhandari was just plain angry.
“My car was parked in the driveway and I got a ticket,” she said. “It isn’t a parking lot. It’s my driveway. I’m not paying.”
Director of Public Safety Dave Meyer said he is unaware that there were driveway fines imposed, although he said that he does not doubt it, because he thinks it has been done before.
“I don’t know about this,” Meyer said. “We can ticket in driveways. I don’t know how many have been ticketed.”
Many ticketed seniors echoed the complaint that they were not fully informed that although they were not using campus parking lots, their cars needed to be registered. Some felt that the woodframe orientation program, WesHome, should have included information on car registration.
Associate Director of Campus Fire Safety Barbara Spalding, who is in charge of the WesHome program, said that car registration can be mentioned to seniors next year if Public Safety would like.
“Nobody has anything to do with that except Public Safety,” she said. “The WesHome program is meant to communicate facilities issues. People can ask us to include topics. Public Safety has never asked us to include information about registering cars.”
Meyer said that seniors were in fact informed. He cited an e-mail that Dean Mike Whaley sent at the beginning of the year, asking seniors to register their cars.
“All students who have a car on campus must register their vehicle with Public Safety, and park only in designated student lots,” reads the e-mail, which Meyer said was sent out at the end of the summer. “Public Safety will begin ticketing immediately. Parking rules and regulations remain in effect even when classes are not in session.”
According to Max Loewinger ’08, who lives across the street from the angry residents of 40 Fountain Ave. and has paid close attention to the driveway ticketing, the policy has its flaws. He thinks that many students will opt to park on the street instead of paying the $50 registration fee and using their driveways.
“People are going to start parking on the streets,” Loewinger said. “It’s going to put so much pressure on the streets. It seems like a badly thought-out policy.”
Loewinger thinks there are motives behind the fines that reflect what he sees as the University’s changing administrative values.
“In contrast to my freshman year, the University now comes in and acts in ways that are really more invasive and seem like just ways to make money,” he said. “The people I’ve talked to are sort of incredulous because it really seems like just another attempt to extract money from the Wesleyan student body.”
Last year, PSafe collected about $46,000 in parking fines, Meyer told the Argus. If students do not want to pay fines, he said, there is a new way to approach the problem.
“Students can appeal fines on our new motor vehicle ticket appeal system on the Public Safety home page,” he said.
Psafe’s homepage is located at http://www.wesleyan.edu/publicsafety/, and the appeal system appears in the right-hand column under “appeal a ticket.”