I'm writing in response to Rob Heroy's letter from Thursday's edition of The Daily Tar Heel ("Student Wonders How DPS Could Possibly Need More Money"). Since the real issue behind night parking has completely escaped the attention of the DTH (with Valentine's Day, stories about hooking up and all those other things that are obviously so much more important taking the spotlight), I hope to provide some insight into the issue.
The reason that the Department of Public Safety needs more money is that they recently lost the rights to all money collected from parking fines. I don't know the specifics, but there is a law on North Carolina's books that states that all moneys collected from parking tickets and fines go to the town or county.
The law was rarely enforced, and our University and many others in the state had been keeping these funds to foot the bill for their police forces, transit systems, etc. Recently, a lawsuit was filed against the state. Because of this, DPS has to give the million or so dollars they collect annually to either Chapel Hill or Orange County instead of keeping it to pay for things. The unexpected loss of this revenue has put a pretty big hole in DPS's pockets.
Do we really think they want to be bothered with night parking permits either? It makes them have to go write tickets instead of going to Krispy Kreme or playing tiddlywinks or whatever it is they do around here at night. Still, when you lose a cool million that you fully expected to have, you have to fill in the gaps from something.
If you ask me, if our student government really wanted to affect the threat of night parking, they'd probably have better luck by lobbying our legislature to repeal the offending law (which sounds like it doesn't have a leg to stand on, since the beneficiaries provide neither funding, permits, space nor manpower for the enforcement of parking regulations) instead of sticking a guy in the Pit with a megaphone and doing everything short of begging from a system that has few other places to turn.
Ari Sanders
Senior
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