The leaders of the University of North Alabama’s Student Government Association met with UNA administration to discuss student, faculty, and staff issues with UNA parking.
SGA met with President Kitts on January 31 with new data collected by UNA’s Office of Institutional Research to address UNA’s parking areas. These areas include parking for residential students, commuter students, faculty and staff during the rush hours of the school week.
SGA and UNA administration discussed several options to alleviate parking, including enhancing campus walkability and potentially constructing a two-story parking garage on Lot O.
SGA President Kerigan Mardis assembled a Parking Ad Hoc committee to advise and represent the UNA community and administration in addressing these parking issues.
Since the demolition of the new LaGrange residence hall, SGA, Housing and Residence Life and the OIR have conducted research to survey student parking throughout the day.
SGA surveyed 65 senate representatives for UNA students, faculty and staff, and found that 95% of them felt the university needed more parking.
In SGA’s memorandum, they cited many students’ willingness to contribute to better parking opportunities, staff’s competition with residents and students, and faculty feeling uninformed about gated-off parking for events.
SGA also performed several other surveys on students, finding that parking is the root of many frustrations at the university.
HRL and University Police found that out of 1018 north residential students with parking passes, there were only 943 spaces to accommodate them, also sharing many of these spaces with commuter students.
The OIR simultaneously conducted research across the entire campus between 7:30 am and 9 pm to measure filled parking spots on campus.
The OIR accounted for all 2136 UNA-owned student parking spots, assuming that every residential student with a parking pass had a car parked on campus and was attending class.
This data also does not include the 249 city-owned parking spots on Court St and Pine St and assumes that no parking has been cut off by faculty, staff, events or construction.
The OIR found that among the 718 spots left for commuters fell short up to 732 parking spots for a total of 1450 commuter students on campus at peak commuter hours.
The OIR also found that the overflow occurred between 10 am and 3 pm on most days, with the Tuesday and Thursday crowd nearly doubling between 10 am and 10:30 am. Fridays have the least overflow on parking with 110 people between 10 am and 12 pm.
Currently, UNA is expanding the parking lot across from Collier Library and is implementing several gravel lots across campus.
