Editor’s Note: For safety reasons, Nathan has requested to remain anonymous. 

Anyone who has a car on campus will probably come into contact with the parking division at some point. The Iowa State Parking Division is a part of the Division of Public Safety (DPS) and is completely self-supporting. All profits they receive during the year go directly towards future capital projects for the University.

“The Parking Division made $3,549,297 the last fiscal year,” said Mark Miller Assistant Director of the ISU Parking Division. “But after all of our expenses were paid, there was a profit of only $475,498, which will be put directly towards future projects.”

Miller said Iowa State has the second lowest permit prices in the Big 12, beat only by Ohio State University. The best way to reduce the amount of parking violations is simply to raise the price. When the price of fines was raised in 2009, the parking division saw a revenue drop of $53,259.

Being a self-supporting division of the university, they are required to pay all expenses for the services they offer to students. These include Cyride, help vans, snow removal for all lots, maintenance on bike racks and parking lots, lighting the parking lots and many others.

The Parking division is constantly changing, explained Aaron Steffen, the Parking Enforcement Supervisor. This year they changed appeals and permit requests to online, which saves roughly $70,000 in labor and paper. They also purchased new ticket writers, with cameras included, which has reduced the amount of appeals dramatically. Also, the process through which they tow cars has changed. They now call the owner to give them a chance to move their car.

“We don’t like to tow cars if we don’t have to,” Steffen said. “It wastes parking division time because the officer has to sit there and wait for the tow truck, and all the money made from a tow goes to the towing company. We don’t see any of it.”

Miller explained future changes they are working on. Currently, they are looking into an app that will show all open parking spot and meters on campus using chips implanted into the ground that registers the cars above it. They are also working on purchasing cameras that will mount on the parking division vehicles which will read license plates and determine whether or not that person can park in that spot, as well as a new gate on Osborne Drive to make campus more pedestrian friendly.

“We are always trying to improve our campus,” Miller said. “A lot of this stuff is a little too expensive at the moment, but we are always looking to the future.”

The Parking Division has 24 officers working for them: one full time enforcement officer and 23 part time students. Steffen said they used to hire many more, who would work shorter hours, but “the students weren’t learning as much as they should.”

So they cut the hours and hired less people. There are only eight people working at once, including the full time officer, who only works evenings.

“I joined because of some friends in my major,” said Nathan, a senior working for the parking division. “They were talking about and it seemed like a nice job. It fit nicely into my schedule so I thought, ‘Why not?’”

The parking division writes, on average, 250-350 tickets per day. Miller said the top 100 violators receive 8.2% of all citations, and the highest amount of citations received by one person is 150.