SA aggressively fights for parking spaces

30 minute meeting productive

BY BRADLEY WOOTEN

The Student Association of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee unanimously passed three pieces of legislation on Sunday, July 30 during a thirty minute meeting.

The SA passed legislation condemning Wisconsin Senate Bill 362, commonly known as Residential

Preferred Parking, which passed earlier this year. In April, Gov. Jim Doyle signed the bill into law, giving the city of Milwaukee the authority to earmark 721 parking spaces for residents.

“These are spaces commuters might otherwise use,” said SA President Samantha Prahl.

RPP returned to the Milwaukee Common Council for consideration on how to assign these spots earlier this summer.

“D’Amato attempted to sneak this by in the summer when there were fewer students around,” Prahl said. “That’s unacceptable.”

Prahl and other SA officials lobbied Ald. Robert Donovan, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, which is charged with organizing the program, to remove RPP from the council’s agenda until UWM classes resume. Other aldermen were also lobbied to support its removal, Prahl said. The Council, with a two-thirds vote, could have overturned the decision of the chair to remove RPP from the agenda.

The bill allows one parking space to be taken away in the surrounding neighborhood for every parking space created on campus. A maximum number of spaces has not been set.

Despite the delay, RPP should be in place sometime next month, D’Amato said.

“The program is a little more difficult than we thought it would be to put together,” D’Amato said.
The difficulty was determining how to handle guest parking permits for residents and which blocks RPP would go on, he said.

The neighborhood surrounding UWM has opposed parking structures near campus but supported the Pavilion/Klotsche Center, which added 615 spaces, in exchange for RPP, D’Amato said.

“It’s all about give and take,” D’Amato said. “We’ve created a win-win on campus. Closer parking for students and faculty and we’ve allowed the neighbors to get some relief.”

In other action, SA is demanding an administrative response to the city’s removal of 310 parking spots at the Northpoint and Bradford Beach U-Park lots. Students who use the U-Pass park-and-ride program will now compete for the parking spots at the Veteran and McKinley lots.

UWM partnered with Milwaukee County three years ago to use the Bradford and Northpoint parking lots to provide additional spaces while the Klotsche Pavillion was under construction.

“We lost use of the large surface lot that the Pavillion was built upon,” said UWM spokesman Tom Luljak. “We said at the time that we would return the Bradford and Northpoint lots to full public access once the Pavillion parking structure was completed.”

Finally, those students who use U-PASS, which is funded by segregated fees, will no longer have to present both their U-PASS card and UWM ID to ride the bus. A sticker to be placed on UWM IDs will replace the old card.