(PHOTO/Kelcie Hathcock)
By Patrick Stephens
Staff Writer
The Troy University Police Department has issued 5596 parking tickets so far this academic year.
These tickets can be ranging in price from $10 for parking in the wrong zone for your parking permit all the way up to $75 for parking in a handicap zone without the proper permit.
“We don’t issue tickets to try and raise revenue contrary to popular beliefs,” said University Police Chief John McCall. “The police department doesn’t receive a dime of ticket money.”
Due to this, the police department is not able to track how many of these tickets have been paid back. Many of these tickets may never be paid, as they could be warnings or written to people that visit ed campus and may never be back.
The problem identified by Chief McCall is keeping appropriate parking available to the appropriate permit holders. “The whole thing is chasing the problem. When yellow decals park in a black zone, the black decals don’t have enough spots to park and they park in spots reserved for residents, forcing them to take other spots and the problem compounds itself.”
“I’ve been in this job for 27 years and things are no different today than they were when I started,” Dot Helms, radio dispatcher and records clerk for the Troy University Police Department, “Then we had myself, the chief and six officers to about 2,500 students and we are hearing the same complaints now that we did then.”
The issue has been identified to be a problem of convenience than anything else.
Chief McCall also went on to urge students to make use of the Troy shuttle system by parking in some of the outlying areas and riding closer to campus.
He expressed concern that if those systems are not utilized they may be scaled back, causing more students to have to drive onto campus and compounding the parking issue.
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