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At what cost, parking?

Students are already being nickel-and-dimed by the myriad of activity fees, administrative fees, lab fees, housing fees, financial aid fees and payment processing fees.

This year the University, namely the Campus Safety Department, welcomed students into the new year with a $10-per-semester parking permit fee.

Everyone knows how expensive a college education is. At the University of La Verne, students are achingly familiar with this.

So what’s another $10 tacked onto the tens of thousand for tuition et al? UCLA students pay as much as $247.50 a semester for the privilege of parking on campus.

Try parking at other campuses, and one quickly appreciates that anything under a mile-long trek is downright convenient.

Perhaps it is our uniquely American automobile culture that makes this meager new fee seem so deep.

No. The outrage is based on principles far less abstract. It’s the latest example of heavy-handed decisions being made without input from those affected, and lacking any clear benefit.

What is the value proposition here? An August 13 memo from Campus Safety Director John Lentz justifies the fee as necessary to satisfy villainous, yet unspecified, “(Air Quality Management District) mandates” and improving “customer service in the area of parking permit issuance and compliance.”

Could that really be as absurd as it sounds? Fees will go toward maintaining the massive infrastructure required to issue more permits, and better yet, pay for somebody to patrol the campus writing tickets for not having a valid permit?

And what does this have to do with air quality?

There is a growing sense that this accumulation of fees, as a sort of shadow-tuition, is a means of dodging the issue of greater financial problems, like the fact that the university might be slowly going bankrupt.

Couldn’t other revenue be more aptly used?

What about the funds generated from the dozens of tickets written daily on campus by University employees? The finances derived from hundreds of tickets written annually are not enough?

No, for the very simple reason that not one penny from these citations go to the University. For some reason, the tickets written by paid University employees go directly to the city.

A clear understanding of where the funds are going, and how it would be of direct benefit would ease the pain.

Also troubling is the timing of the decision. The university has developed this annoying habit of ducking controversy by waiting until summer to refashion policy and invent new fees. What happened to the integral values of dialogue, discourse and debate?

Trade away these values, and we face a bankruptcy far worse than monetary.

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Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.

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