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Panel to revamp parking plan The University Board of Trustees on March 28 voted down a proposed parking plan that was set to go into effect in August and directed Carolina administrators to come back with an alternative. The board objected to the plan's call for a night parking program, which had been proposed as a way to help generate $2 million to go toward alternative transportation programs and parking lot debt. The program would have supplied about 30 percent of the $2 million. Administrators now will develop a plan without a night parking program and submit the revised proposal to the trustees. At an April 3 Employee Forum meeting, Nancy Suttenfield, vice chancellor for finance and administration, said the administration will convene a small working group of faculty, staff and students to come up with the new proposal. Suttenfield said that Chancellor James Moeser has insisted that the proposal include daytime parking permit price increases no higher than those included in the original plan, which called for increases of 20 percent for most employees. Instead the plan will focus on cutting expenses, and the working group will set priorities about what is most needed in transportation and parking programs and what can be cut, Suttenfield said. Under the original proposal, students and employees without daytime parking permits would have purchased permits allowing them to park on campus at night. Two free, guarded parking lots with transit service to main campus locations also would have been available. The trustees rejected the plan because they felt it might hamper night activities on campus and because of safety concerns raised by students, who felt that using the two free lots -- the Bell Tower and Bowles Drive lots -- would have jeopardized students without permits as they would not have been able to park as close as possible to their destinations. Whatever decisions are made about next year, they will come in the context of demand for parking at Carolina continuing to outstrip its supply by ever wider margins. The campus master plan calls for increasing the amount of green space on south campus, and much of that space will be made available by tearing up surface parking lots. The plan also calls for replacing these lots with eight new parking decks. The decks will provide enough spaces to meet the growing demand from campus visitors and UNC Health Care patients, but they will not meet the growth in demand from employees or students. Campus officials say this all means that transportation alternatives will become more and more critical, and this is driving the need for the additional $2 million in next year's transportation and parking budget. Included in the $2 million is $500,000 to subsidize fare-free transit for a full year and $700,000 to provide free bus service to new park-and-ride lots and cover inflationary increases in transit. University Gazette
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