SARAH WUELLNER, Sports Editor–

If you have a car on campus, you have probably fallen victim to receiving a parking ticket from campus safety and perhaps you may not have felt you deserved one. 

You might have forgotten to purchase a parking sticker, parked on a quad with a different color that did not match the color of your permit, or, as many have recently, received a ticket for parking in the wrong spot in the Slayter Union Parking Garage. 

This parking garage is right below our Denison Student Union. It has four levels to it with the top level P1 housing the campus safety office. This level also has two reserved ten-minute parking spaces that students supposedly can use if they are running into slayter to quickly grab say coffee, food or a package. The rest of P1 is mostly for campus safety officers and for visitors to campus.

The most traffic seen in the parking garage is from faculty members and visitors interested in admissions. Despite these two groups having priority for parking as they do not live on campus, they do not fill the entire parking garage unless there is a large event like move-in day or Big Red Weekend. 

Therefore, I do not see a reason why all four levels are reserved for these groups that do not include current Denison students. Furthermore, the Slayter Union is the student union so it would make sense to mark at least half of a parking level for current Denison students. This is helpful for students who may be injured and not able to readily walk to and from their dorms. 

Also, it would be helpful for students like myself who may be running from meeting to class to events off-campus. I teach at a local high school and sometimes parking my car at my dorm and sprinting to my next class or meeting is just not feasible. 

It would be beneficial to have the option of parking in the Slayter parking garage for when I have to be somewhere on academic quad in a hurry. I believe students should have maybe a limit of a couple hours to park in the garage, just enough time for a class period so the student is not late and does not receive a ticket when they are too busy to move their car. 

I understand that our campus is small and therefore walking to and from quads is not that time consuming, but in some circumstances it just is not doable. 

A few of my peers are in a boot with crutches right now and making the trek from South quad or North quad to academic quad is quite a challenge. I have had numerous peers receive a parking citation for parking in the Slayter garage on all levels, but I have also had peers not receive a ticket for parking a different way perhaps by backing in instead of pulling straight into a space.

Finally, I do not believe that frequently handing out parking tickets to Denison students for parking in the Slayter Union parking garage is justified. Students should have at least half a level of the parking garage reserved for them when there are no large on-campus events occurring.