Campus Safety collected $44,000 in ticket fines last year
Photo courtesy calvin.edu
Campus Safety issued over 2,800 tickets during the 2017-2018 school year, resulting in over $44,000 in fees for Calvin students and staff. The number of parking permits issued has stayed fairly constant at 2,500 permits a year.
The ticket count is actually lower than previous years. The year prior, Campus Safety issued 3,501 tickets. From 2011 to 2016, Campus Safety issued more than 4,000 tickets every year.
Campus Safety Director Bill Corner credits the drop to students being more mindful of parking rules.
Tickets vary from $15 to $50. More serious offenses like having a vehicle on campus without registration or parking in a handicapped parking spot warrant the $50 fine. Corner said that they purposefully keep the registration fines high in order to discourage students from believing they could pay less in fines than for a ticket. The city of Grand Rapids has $100 fines for parking in handicapped parking, which they occasionally enforce on Calvin’s campus.
The money from fines goes to Calvin’s operating fund. All of the money that Calvin takes in, whether that be tuition, donations or parking tickets, ends up in the same operating fund, which is then allocated to different parts of campus according to the budget. Campus Safety officers receive no commission on tickets they issue.
Campus Safety officers also do not have ticket quotas that they must fulfill. Corner laughed at the idea. “If we had quotas, there’d be a lot more tickets issued than what there are. … If there were a quota system, I’d have officers just non-stop sitting at stop signs and writing tickets for students and employees.”
Corner said that Campus Safety could make a lot of money off people not stopping at the stop signs on campus; however, they do not have the staffing to make that possible. He also does not think that recent budget cuts will result in starting a quota system.
Anon • Sep 24, 2018 at 4:28 am
While the statement that students “tickets have dropped because students are more mindful of parking” seems logical it is important to remember that correlation does not always mean causation. Although harsher penalties could have an effect on the drop in tickets I think there is better explanation for this. For example I myself got a bunch of tickets prior to 2017-2018 school year and last year only received one, did I stop parking violations…. no…. I just got caught less. This I believe, is better explained by the budget cuts that resulted in the firing of the entire student staff that was consistently out there checking for violations. This was a big change that happened exactly the year the tickets dropped. While it may be easy for people to pat themselves on the back and say people have more respect for the parking rules. I find it unlikely that students randomly one year decided to radically change their parking habits for the good of the community. I would challenge them to temporarily staff the same number of people in order to compare data. I am also curious as to wether the decision to fire the student staff save Calvin money or costs the school money due to the lost revenue in tickets. This would be very interesting to find out and it would be nice if Bill Corner could investigate this as it could potentially give us an incentive to hire some more student staff. (on the other hand I don’t like parking tickets so either way this works for me 🙂