SLU Parking Blues: An Abundance of Tickets

The students at St. Lawrence University struggle to find a safe parking spot.   They feel leaving their vehicles in only one parking lot and receiving tickets for parking anywhere else on campus is a big inconvenience. 

“There is just no other options really, you are assigned to one lot and you will get a ticket if you park anywhere else,” claims Jacob Dafeldecker ‘24.  He has bought three parking permits over the years. “I think the fact that we have to pay upwards of $100 to be able to park here when we already pay enough in tuition is unfair,” He also commented. This means $300 at least in parking passes alone, excluding any tickets he could have gotten. 

Heather teRiele, director of student financial services talked about students coming into their offices regarding parking tickets. “We do get complaints,” she expressed that “quite a bit,” of the complaints were from students who were ticketed for simply parking in the wrong lot.  

teRiele graduated from St. Lawrence in 2003 and also ran into parking as an issue. “For an hour you could look out the window and there were tow trucks coming and they were towing cars that didn’t get the parking passes,”  she recalled. This was within the first two weeks of when the students were supposed to get their passes.         

Crysta Corbett, technical services coordinator at safety and security, communicated that it “happens often,” that students get ticketed because they are parked in the wrong lot.  “It’s mostly students that are parked in staff parking,” she said.  Due to the number of tickets given for being in the wrong parking lots, Corbett proposed “we could attempt to put in a new parking lot,” but, there is no further news about that proposal getting put into action.   

“I was parked in the wrong lot, it wasn’t fair because I was only parked there for five minutes.” Olivia Barringer, a member of the senior class stated about receiving her parking ticket.  She went on to explain that she only went to drop something off to her coach and came back surprised to see a ticket on her car.  She believes there should be a “5-10 minute parking situation,” for the exact reason she ran into. 

Jasmin Jenkins who is enrolled in the sophomore class at SLU found the price of the tickets to be shocking. “I would definitely say it was overpriced given the cost of the ticket was almost half of the parking permit itself,”  she noted.  Jenkins was also ticketed for being parked in the wrong assigned lot.