As of July 1, visitor parking passes at Iowa State are no longer free. Five dollars per day with a maximum of five days of parking is what students and visitors are to expect coming back to classes this fall.

However, Mark Miller, Iowa State’s Director of Parking, said that visitors are taking spaces away from students and faculty.

“In the past, the visitor permits were designed for parents and grandparents and siblings and even a boyfriend or girlfriend, but it got to the point where they’re taking up parking spaces,” Miller said. “The discussion is, should we be providing free parking for visitors when the students and staff have to pay?”

He said most schools do not provide free parking and Iowa State’s visitor parking costs less than other schools in the Big 12.

Solving this issue started with recommendations from the Transportation Advisory Council, a group composed of students and faculty.

“The students on the committee were the most proactive, saying ‘we should be charging visitors, our parents, to pay five dollars to come visit us.’ It may alleviate some of the people that are abusing the visitor permits – going online and getting a free permit to do a construction project or students that are getting free permits to go to class and then getting caught later,” Miller said.

Visitors are anyone who is not faculty, staff, a student, a vendor or a construction worker, Miller said.

“I think that there’s a misnomer out there that we’re collecting tuition dollars like everybody else,” Miller said. “We are self-supporting, so we don’t get any tuition or state dollars. Everything we have to pay for — lot repairs, salaries, IT Services, 285 or 290,000 [dollars] to CyRide for the Orange Route, scheduled capital projects, etcetera — has to come from permit fees, fines and meter revenues.”

Capital projects, Miller explained, are major future repair or construction projects funded by whatever money is left after annual costs, like lot repairs and salaries, are settled.

“By spreading out who’s helping to pay, [it] keeps everybody’s costs down, and that’s the goal,” Miller said. “We want to provide good parking at a reasonable price.”

The Parking Division’s policy on visitor voids has also changed.    

“There used to be three voided tickets in a lifetime. We reduced that to one,” Miller said. “If you come onto campus, it can be confusing. If you park in the wrong spot, we’ll take that ticket back and try to explain where you should park and how to get the proper permit.”

Overall, Miller would like to see people taking alternative means of transportation to keep parking spaces available.

“We’re hoping people ride CyRide,” Miller said. “We help fund all the bike initiatives on campus. We were part of [implementing] the Zipcar to provide car sharing services on campus. We’re looking at all kinds of different means of transportation to reduce the amount of cars coming to campus.”