On paper -- in this case, on a fold-out map of campus parking lots -- Dave Ricketts’s job at the University of Iowa is to manage 14,000 parking spaces and a collection of commuting-related services, among them a 27-vehicle, student-operated bus system; a van pool that serves 752 riders; and 4,700 spaces for locking up bikes. In practice, though, what he manages is human behavior -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. His tools are familiar ones: meters, cashiers, permits, signs, bus passes, and the kind of good, old-fashioned fear that issuing 120,000 parking tickets a year can inspire.
“The underlying principle is, you’re never going to have enough space to meet everyone’s needs, so you’re going to have to allocate, and you will have to do that in accord with the mission of the institution or unit,” says Mr. Ricketts, a tall, hearty Iowa native who writes mysteries in his spare time and keeps an eye out for parking-related New Yorker cartoons. When he’s talking about parking, though, his friendly demeanor becomes serious: “We issue violations to make sure the people we’ve allocated the space to get it.”
On a table in his office, in a small building surrounded by Lot 43, Mr. Ricketts spreads the most recent edition of the 12-panel campus-parking map. He points a fine-bore mechanical pencil at green rectangles and polygons, one after another, on both sides of the Iowa River. They’re the prime real estate on the 1,900-acre campus -- the ramps and lots reserved for faculty and staff members. Farther away -- up by Hancher Auditorium, out past the baseball stadium -- are the orange commuter lots, which accommodate those employees who can’t be shoehorned into the green lots. The orange lots also accommodate students who commute; students who live in the residence halls park in the red “storage” lot, which is even farther away.
“Currently we could find a space for anyone who wanted one,” says Mr. Ricketts, whose title is director of parking and transportation. “There have been times when either the west campus or the east campus was locked up.” The university has 13,100 employees, who hold 8,600 employee-parking permits, paying $39 a month for ramps, $26 a month for close-in lots, $13 a month for commuter lots. “We look at your work address, and you’re assigned to a lot,” he says. “This gets at both the good and the bad.”
The good is this: “There’s a pretty good probability there’s a space available when you come in.”
And the bad? “Everyone qualifies for at least one commuter lot.” Meaning you’ll take a bus from there to your workplace. “And then you may put your name on several waiting lists.” Meaning years could pass -- decades, even -- before you earn seniority enough to get a space in the lot closest to where you work. The garage beneath the business school? Dream on. Hospital Parking Ramps No. 3 and 4? Don’t hold your breath.
The waiting list, says Mr. Ricketts, is “one of the biggest issues we deal with.”
“The emotionality of it can get pretty intense. Lots of faculty members approach us directly -- we send them back to the deans. And there are lots of stories that fall into the category of ‘Do you know who I am?’ ”
The waiting list is such a big issue among faculty members, in fact, that two years ago the administration asked Mr. Ricketts to make the system more generous to the university’s 1,800 professors. “The underlying issues were recruitment and retention,” says Mr. Ricketts. But a strong current of “Midwestern egalitarianism” at the university, he says, made it difficult to suggest favoring professors over staff members on the waiting lists -- even though the old system, which was based on the date you put your name on the list for a particular lot, gave faculty requests a boost by automatically backdating them a year.
The new system, a Solomonic marvel, was devised by parking services and the university’s staff council. It created two seniority-based waiting lists for every faculty and staff lot -- one for professors and the other for staff members. As spaces become available, they are offered to the top person on each list by turns -- faculty, staff, faculty, staff. Over time, popular lots will end up 50-percent faculty, 50-percent staff, even though staff members outnumber faculty members by more than five to one. But no one will have been forced out of a lot he or she already parked in. “That,” Mr. Ricketts says, “would have been the end of this discussion.”
For deans trying to hire star professors, he says, the system has additional flexibility. A dean can ask that a faculty member be put at the top of the faculty list for a certain lot -- but only if the dean is willing to take the heat from professors who are bumped as a result.
Over all, “it’s really a very effective system,” he says. Still, he knows he could walk outside and easily find 10 people who think parking services does a terrible job.
Mr. Ricketts came to Iowa as a student after stints in the military and in the quarrying business. In his second year, he started working as a driver for the student-run Cambus system. His major was general studies, but he took a lot of economics courses before graduating. In 1979, he went to work full-time as a Cambus manager. Five years later, his boss asked if he would run parking. “I knew nothing about parking,” Mr. Ricketts says. “I thought it sounded boring.”
It’s been anything but. The job is “very political,” he says, and it comes with a wide range of responsibilities and meetings. Including cashiers, bus drivers, mechanics, ramp-cleaning crews, and customer-service representatives, Mr. Ricketts estimates that his department has about 350 full-and part-time employees. The parking-and-transportation office builds, pays for, and maintains its own facilities, including the ramps. “I’ve built four and a half decks since I’ve been here, and you don’t build any easy ones,” he says while showing off the newest, a $10.2-million structure called the Newton Road Ramp. He must be doing something right: The gleaming, glass-sheathed ramp earned a spread in Architecture magazine in February.
Between meetings, he fields the worst of the phone calls. He speaks diplomatically with those who call in pleading for special treatment and insist on speaking to someone in charge. (“There’s a million stories in the naked city,” he observes. “Some of them are amazing. Some of them aren’t true.”) He tries to reason with people who have already spent half an hour arguing with his secretary, Starr Jennings, about whether “we’re hiding in the bushes waiting for meters to expire.”
“We’ve all had, in this business, some pretty ugly incidents, the worst of human behavior,” says Mr. Ricketts, who drives a dusty Acura Integra with a Lot 43 permit hanging from the mirror. To a visitor from a larger city, the university’s $3, $5, and $10 fines seem inconsequential (although it’s $100 if you park in a handicap space without a permit), but not everyone here agrees. One man slammed a field-service officer’s head in the door of her car after she wrote him a ticket. There are people who tell cashiers in parking ramps that they have no intention of paying 60 cents an hour to park, and then dare the cashiers to do anything about it. (They call the campus police). There are students who scream abuse out of windows. There’s a physician who parks so cavalierly that field-service officers recognize his Alfa Romeo at a glance.
“You write tickets to change behavior,” Mr. Ricketts says: to prevent staff members from filling up the public-parking ramps meant for hospital patients and visitors, to stop contractors from leaving their pickups wherever they want. And while many people imagine that students are the worst offenders, he says they’re not. “I don’t think students have done anything that faculty and staff members haven’t -- faculty and staff will counterfeit permits and not feel they’ve done anything wrong.”
The behavior that Mr. Ricketts would most like to change is one that most people here were raised on: They like to drive themselves to work, alone. “We have a very intense set of programs to reduce parking demand,” he says, mentioning the van pools, which are subsidized by the university, and $10-a-month passes for the two local bus systems (Cambus service is free for all riders), and the 26 spaces in one of the hospital ramps that have been converted to bike parking. “And we’re about to give preferential treatment to three-person carpools.” The one thing he won’t do is let market pricing control demand, as some people in the college of business have proposed. That would be fine for the university’s physicians, but what about the food-service workers who come in at 4 a.m. to make breakfast for the patients?
Fairness is always a dilemma. A small lot beside the Mayflower Residence Hall has been bothering Mr. Ricketts for months now. It has 146 spaces assigned to students, but on many weekend nights it fills up with other cars. The field-service officers ticket the intruders, but they also end up ticketing permit holders, who are parked illegally because the legal spaces are full. One solution would be to add a key-operated gate, but that means realigning the pavement and rebuilding a culvert, hiking the project cost up to $60,000. Even so, Mr. Ricketts thinks it may be worthwhile, since the current situation is unworkable as well as unfair.
“Even the president jokes with me -- she says I have the most powerful job on campus,” Mr. Ricketts says after getting off the phone with another person seeking special dispensation. The case is compelling, but Mr. Ricketts asks the man to try going through normal channels first. “You don’t feel powerful,” he says, “with all this pressure on you.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A56
