Perhaps I can paint a perfect picture of a pretty typical Pepperdine problem.
I’m waiting for the shuttle one day near the Com Pad, and I look down into the baseball field parking lot at a Public Safety punk giving my homeboy’s Jeep a ticket. I’m thinking to myself, “OK, I know this kid goes to this school and he has been for over a year now, he’s parked on campus attending class and getting a $20 parking ticket on top of his grandeur tuition.”
Somehow, this situation seemed quite impractical. And this has happened to me as well. Yeah, so I parked on a green curb, at the school I’m attending, in class, paying an arm and a leg, accruing personal debt (and paying for Public Safety’s salary I might add), and here he is screwing me to pay for a parking ticket.
I’ve driven by these same heroic toy cops and eye witnessed them measuring the distance from the curb to someone’s tire. Give me a break.
This oh-too-familiar scenario happens on average of 120 times a day. That’s right, folks … 120 parking tickets a day. Let’s do the math. We’ll say that all these tickets are $20, although the cars that are towed far surpass the amount of 20 bucks. 120 times 20 is 2,400 … dollars… a day … times five days a week … is 12,000. Yes, $12,000 a week.
Perhaps my number of tickets is wrong, but I trust my reliable source (I won’t tell them it was you, Lester). Now, times … what 14 weeks in a semester? We’re now up to $168,000 in half a year.
Solution: let’s build a parking structure. Yaaaaay! What a great idea! Pepperdine should take the money that they squeeze out of us and put it toward something useful. I see new buildings going up left and right all over campus, in turn eventually creating more traffic and further exacerbating our parking problem.
Come on, y’all, let us look past our money-hungry selves and solve this problem that I and everyone else whines about.
Although a parking structure would create a slight problem: Pepperdine would have to find a new way of pilfering us students, and Public Safety would lose their thrill in life and be left twiddling their thumbs all day.
Matt Slaughter
Sophomore, business major
January 24, 2002