JACK NIMESHEIM, Special to The Denisonian —
No, the precious forty dollars that you had to fork over through Student Accounts will not feed a President Weinberg salary bonus. Believe it or not, campus safety officers would prefer that you stop receiving parking citations.
Like many of you, I have been a self-proclaimed “victim” of Denison’s parking violation enforcements. Every time I received a citation, I was willing to acknowledge the fact that I failed to follow the parking rules. However, with each citation, I became more and more frustrated about not knowing where my citation fees were going.
Two university officials, Chief David Rose (Director of Campus Safety) and Mr. David English (CFO/VP for Finance & Management), were kind enough to speak with me about the matter. And after considering their insights, I believe that students have no good reason to complain about receiving parking citations.
My reasons are as follows, all of which will be elaborated on below: 1) campus safety officers have no incentive to hand out tickets, 2) the Denison finance team does not get significant benefit out of ticketing funds, and 3) safety hazards would arise around campus if it were not for parking rule enforcement.
Campus safety officers do not get any of the money that students pay in tickets., nor do they receive any kind of bonus for handing out more tickets. Parking enforcement is just another part of their job, a secondary part that gets taken care of once they complete their primary objectives: keeping the Denison community safe and responding to student needs.
As of November 5th, the campus safety office had received over 10,000 phone calls and responded to over 1,000 room lockouts since the beginning of the current student year. Do you really think the 10-person day-to-day staff wants to spend additional time handing out parking citations? Seems like a rhetorical question to me, but I asked Chief Rose for you anyway.
“Our campus safety staff would prefer not to write any tickets,” he said.
So, if not to special individuals, where does the citation money end up? If you want the long answer, here: into a greater sum of money which English calls the school’s “capital expenditures.” Annually, Denison’s capital expenditures total roughly $20 million dollars. Somewhere between $25,000 and $45,000 dollars of that comes from parking citations (for my fellow Journalism majors, that’s less than 1% of $20 million).
The capital expenditures go towards school development projects, like building renovations and agriculture maintenance.
If you want the short answer, take it from English:
“Denison is a nonprofit. If the college generates a surplus at the end of a year, it goes back into enhancements.”
The money goes into bettering your experience at Denison.
Your last question: why do we even get charged for parking tickets, then? The answer is simple: incentive. I could name a whole laundry list of convenience issues that would arise without parking enforcement, but I’ll take the pathos approach and list two safety ones instead.
First, if the handicap spots weren’t protected, how does the poor freshman on crutches at Mitchell get back to Shorney without parking? Second, imagine this… your buddy’s nightly “chop” goes wrong, and your building goes into flames… but the Granville fire department can’t get there because your car is blocking the fire lane!
It’s time for us all to take a look in the irror. Is that one “Campo” officer driven by an internal power struggle to take 20s out of your virtual wallet like they’re Advils in a bottle the morning after a night at Lampson, or are you just a convenience-driven college kid unwilling to admit to fault?