Voice your opinion! Send your questions and/or comments on the parking situation to [email protected] and UTAPS Manager Nancy Fox will answer them in a weekly feature on www.statehornet.com!

Construction of a third parking structure will put an even bigger space crunch on campus drivers this semester.

That was felt immediately on Monday morning when thousands of students returned to Sacramento State for the Fall semester.

Asphalt on which 800 parking spaces northwest of Hornet Stadium once sat has been ripped up and crews are excavating the dirt beneath.

Government professor Kimberly Nalder says that she had difficulty finding parking on Monday because of the construction. Nalder says she desperately searched four faculty lots before finally finding a space.

“If faculty can’t make it to class on time, the class can’t take place,” Nalder said.

Parking Structure III, along with the construction of a new Hornet Bookstore and the recently announced “University Village,” are part of University President Alexander Gonzalez’s “Destination 2010.”

An off-campus parking lot on Ramona Avenue, near Folsom Boulevard, will be accessible on Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Cars will not be allowed to enter the lot after 2 p.m. A shuttle running from the parking lot to campus will be available to students. Transportation and Parking Services manager Nancy Fox said UTAPS will offer an incentive program for frequent users of the lot. Students and faculty are eligible for the incentive by parking in the Ramona lot and having their OneCard swiped when riding the shuttle back and forth from campus.

Users of the parking lot could win a free semester of parking as incentive.

When asked about using the Ramona Avenue lot and university shuttle services, John Koenig and Philip Meisch, both government majors, say they wouldn’t consider using it.

“I park at the College Town apartment complex across the street,” Koenig said. “I’d rather keep doing that and walk to campus.”

Meisch says he arrived on campus at 7 a.m. in order to secure a parking spot.

“It was pretty easy to find parking at that time,” Meisch said.

Joshua Jacobs, an English major, said his girlfriend, an English graduate student, might be interested in the Ramona Avenue lot.

“When we tried to find parking this morning in Parking Structure I, there were a dozen people entering the lot as we were leaving,” Jacobs said.

Parking Structure III is anticipated to be complete by the Spring 2007 semester. The new bookstore will begin construction in January of 2006. The two projects together will eliminate 1,100 parking spaces from the campus until both projects are complete.

Transportation and Parking Services asked in a campus-wide e-mail that all people who travel to Sac State pursue “alternate commute choices,” while both projects are underway.

Fox said that only about 35 cars were parked in the Ramona lot and five were parked inside Hornet Stadium on Monday despite the reduction in parking inventory.

“Today went a lot smoother than we thought it would ?” for a first day of the semester,” Fox said in a telephone interview with The State Hornet on Monday morning. “Today was a good dress rehearsal for tomorrow – typically more classes are concentrated on Tuesdays and Thursdays, bringing more students and more cars.”

Sac State students may ride Regional Transit busses and Light Rail for free with a current OneCard. In the e-mail, UTAPS also provided information about carpooling and vanpooling, in which students share the cost of a permit and park in preferential spaces, as well as the Guaranteed Ride Home program for campus employees who rideshare to campus more than 60 percent of the time.

UTAPS also provides four Hornet Express Shuttle routes to nearby apartment complexes that students may also ride for free by showing a current OneCard.

State Hornet online editor John Parker contributed to this report