As one of three students who attended the gameday parking meetings this summer, I feel obligated to provide some perspective on the recent developments on the issue.

First, after I initially found out about the gameday parking changes, it was obvious the National Cyclone Club and the athletic department totally overlooked student gameday parking. However, even if this oversight was intentional, athletic director Bruce Van De Velde immediately offered to correct the problem when he received e-mails from students regarding the issue in late June.

Later, despite Mr. Van De Velde’s promise to revise the parking plan and offer public parking, these same concerned students were invited to a meeting with Tom Hill, vice president for student affairs and Pete Englin, dean of students.

With the athletic department already offering to provide parking before these meetings were even conceived, the point of the meetings wasn’t obvious to the students who attended until we got there.

Hill and Englin had absolutely no involvement in the development of the parking plan, but at the meeting they essentially took what, according to the athletic director’s previous comments, was primarily an issue of oversight and turned the meeting into a discussion on student behavior at tailgates.

It appeared Hill and Englin’s number one priority at the July meetings, according to comments they made at the meetings, was to get rid of the great concentration of students in public parking lots, particularly those that are adjacent to the stadium. They perceived last year’s public parking was a threat to student safety and encouraged alcohol use.

Under Hill and Englin’s direction, students were offered four options. Only one included a public parking lot for students, and as Hill and Englin apparently wished, it was placed far away from the stadium in a tiny lot (which in fact is much smaller than it appeared on the plans given to students at the meetings) closer to Hilton Coliseum than to Jack Trice Stadium. The parking passes were added to the plan because the lot offered by the administration had just 98 parking spaces, which pales in comparison to the hundreds of public spaces students used just a year before.

The manner in which students have been underrepresented in this matter, not only by the athletic department, but also by Hill, Englin and our GSB President, Mike Banasiak, is unacceptable.

If the academic administration chooses, like it did this summer, to address student behavior, particularly involving facilities and activities funded by millions of dollars in student money, they should not do so in the absence of students during the summer.

So students are left with access to just 98 parking places in a puny lot closer to campus than the to stadium.

We’re now stuck in an area about the size of a driveway, just a couple years after over $1,000,000 in student money was earmarked for the construction of lots we have been kicked out of. The fiscal and social investment that students have made, not only in the parking lots, but also in Cyclone athletics and Iowa State University as a whole, demands fairness and respect for our views on this issue.

So whose fault is it that there will be no space in a parking lot for you to enjoy tailgating and grilling, as thousands of you would like to do this Saturday? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as the people quoted in yesterday’s article make it appear to be.

Tony Borich

Sophomore

Community and Regional Planning