A rundown of parking at EvCC

The EvCC campus holds 1690 spots for parking. 1247 of those are for student parking, 323 for staff and the rest are for visitor parking and others. So why is it that there is still such a huge problem with parking for students?

It’s only natural to want to park close to our destination, but sometimes that is just not possible. With staff and student needs, there are just too many people and not enough room.

“It does concern me,” said Michael Kerns, Executive Vice President. “I don’t want the lack parking to be a major headache for students. There really is no college campus that doesn’t suffer from parking challenges.”

The amount of student and staff changes from quarter to quarter, and there is more student parking than there is staff parking, it just never seems to be enough.

After 4:30pm during the week, a majority of the staff parking is also available for students, excluding the Broadway Center and the parking located between Pilchuck and Glacier halls.

EvCC holds many events on campus, and sometimes guests are shuttled to campus, and sometimes the campus blocks off student parking for them. So what prompts the subtraction from student parking for special events and guests?

It mostly depends on the nature of the event says Kerns. It also depends on how many spots that they need, it’s a case-by-case decision. If it’s an event like the job fair, they offer shuttles to campus because they just can’t support that and the students. If it’s a meeting and they need 30 or so spaces, then the campus is willing to block off the needed parking spaces. It’s all about the disruption for students and staff, Kerns said.

According to George Olson, the Director of Campus Safety, off campus events have to pay a built in fee for the parking that they need. “Since staff and students are the ones paying for parking, they should have more right to parking than events,” Olson said. Since these events are paying for the parking that they are going to be taking from students, they have just as much right to these spots, but students are main concern. On Saturdays and Sundays there is no fee for event parking. During the week, they encourage associations that hold events to wait until after the peak student hours, which are between 9:00am and 1:00pm.

Olson stresses that parking as close as you want isn’t always possible, but there are other options. EvCC has an agreement with the Army reserve, which allows students to use their parking lot. There are about 52 spaces. Another option is parking at the gym. Many students don’t want to park there because it seems like a long walk. A nutrition class measured the walking distance from there and the Broadway center and it is the exact distance from the gym to the main part of campus as the Broadway Center.

Starting in the fall, there will be 300 spots available in the Rite Aid shopping center for students. Also the Topper Motel will be a parking lot and where the pregnancy center will be an added extension. When the new academic building is being built, some spaces will be lost, but they will gain some of them back with the opening of the building.

In the future is a parking garage, which is scheduled for 2012-2013. “It’s a wonderful idea, I just wish it was sooner,” Olson said. The parking garage is going to be located from the golf course across the street to the DSHS, covering that whole area. It will be a multi-story garage.

Parking may seem like a headache for now, but there are plans for the future.