Parking and Auxiliary Services officials tried Wednesday to clarify parking permit prices that were presented by Graduate and Professional Student Council members at a meeting Tuesday night and reported by The Chronicle Wednesday.
Cautioning that the official 2003-2004 parking plan would not be released for at least two weeks, Director of Parking and Transportation Services Catherine Reeve said permit prices for graduate and professional students who wish next year to remain in the same lots as this year will increase by only about 5 percent, the normal annual fee increase.
GPSC officers had said that according to numbers provided by Reeve at a meeting prior to the general body session, permits for proximate lots next year would run between $300 and $360, up from $222; $700 and $800 for premium lots, up from $444; and $110 and $130 for remote lots, up from $90. Those hikes would have equated to increases of up to 80 percent.
But Reeve said Wednesday that after further consideration, those numbers would not apply to graduate and professional students.
"When we met [Tuesday] we looked at rates that would be in pretax - it would be a situation where before taxes are taken out, that's the gross cost of the permit," Reeve explained. "[We discovered during the meeting that] this doesn't apply to GPSC, because although there are some graduate students on payroll, they don't get taxes taken out.... So what we have to do to make sure [their rates increase only] 5 percent is start where they are now and add 5 percent."
However, GPSC officials late Wednesday said the decision to abandon the steep prices was mostly a result of the plethora of e-mails sent by concerned graduate and professional students to Executive Vice President Tallman Trask after the meeting and the subsequent Chronicle article.
"We are happy to hear that the prices are going to be a small increase for us and not a large increase as we were told," said GPSC Transportation and Parking Committee co-chair Zach Schafer. "We credit the people who sent Tallman Trask e-mails in getting that process in motion."
Schafer, a graduate student in the cell and molecular biology program, said Reeve told him Wednesday that she had received considerable pressure from the administration to limit the fee increase to only about 5 percent. Reeve could not be reached for further comment to confirm or deny this.
"We still feel that the University is not dealing with the future parking plan," Schafer added. "They still need to find someone to pay for [the new] parking garage. We still have issues with the ways they are addressing parking and transportation issues in the long term.... We see this as an act of damage control."
Reeve also addressed concerns Wednesday about the closing of the Duke University Road perimeter lots, which were created last semester to provide a cheap parking alternative to off-campus students, but will close shortly after graduation in May.
"We're not going to leave those people out in the lurch," Reeve said, adding that during the summer, people in those lots will be accommodated in other lots on campus, and in the fall, they will be able to apply for other permits on campus, perhaps in a new inexpensive lot.
"We want there to be a low-cost option, and so we are working very, very hard right now to identify and create a park-and-ride lot nearby campus and serve it by transit so that we can give people that option," she said. "We don't have anything final yet, and hopefully in the next few weeks we will."
The new park-and-ride lots would feature the same number of spots as those on Duke University Road, perhaps even more, but parking officials have yet to obtain a site plan and would not elaborate further on the specifics of the lots until a site is picked. "We are extremely hopeful, and we are going to do everything in our power [to have them ready by the fall]," Reeve said.
Last summer, the University planned to open remote parking lots on Maxwell Street, but a failure to meet Durham city requirements thwarted those efforts, necessitating the usage of the Duke University Road lots.
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