There is a possibility of a new parking garage to be built on the Stephenville campus of Tarleton State University. Rusty Jergins, Vice President for Student Life and Dean of Students, confirmed the possibility in an interview on the current challenges and solutions to parking on the university’s main campus.

Though early in the process and focusing on housing and the growth of the student body, the university will not see many changes this coming fall to the auxiliary enterprise that is Tarleton’s parking system.

 “We are working to look at constructing a parking garage,” Jergins said. “We haven’t hired anyone to design it, and it’s not on a capital plan, other than initially as a part of the master plan… the current university Master Plan shows a parking garage over by the stadium.”

The Master Plan is not a definitive guide, however, and there have already been some changes.

“Now we believe that [the parking garage] probably needs to be more centrally located, but there’s a lot of things that needs to be looked at before we set the location in place,” Jergins said. “We have had some conversations about updating the facility plan and where things are going to be located.

“We constructed some housing in places that we had not planned according to the Master Plan because the plan did not take into account the amount of growth we had. So if you go to the University’s Master Plan, you will see additional student housing on property the university doesn’t own. So part of that plan was the 2020 Plan to go in and buy property and expand the boundaries of the campus, which we haven’t been able to do,” Jergins explained.

According to Jergins, the university is in talks to build a parking garage with 600 – 1,000 additional spaces. However, the location of the garage has not been determined.

“We hired a firm called Kimley-Horn to do a parking study,” Jergins said. “That group came in and looked at our overall parking system and looked at usage, and how we had parking laid out, and we have had some preliminary findings that they think that we should incorporate that we haven’t decided whether we are going to implement or not. But part of their study, they thought that we should consider adding some parking garages that go up, because we are out of land.”

Jergins emphasized that the Master Plan’s predictions for the garage may not look like the final product.

“Look at the university’s Master Plan,” Jergins said. “It showed two separate buildings, but we’re not sure that we’ll do that, so there’s just a lot of conversation within the next 6 to 12 months about what the campus looks like and taking into consideration a garage to be part of that.”

Jergins wants to bring the campus community in to get involved in the process with town hall meetings.

“I want to have some conversations with the campus community to talk about what they see as the parking challenges,” he explained.

During the meetings, Jergins hopes to find solutions to the parking challenges and the inevitable increase in parking fees that will come with new construction.

“I have shared with folks that they should expect the rate to go up,” Jergins said. “We’ve got to do some things different, and again, parking is considered an auxiliary enterprise, and so really it has to be self-supporting. We don’t use state dollars to operate parking, and so I want to have a dialogue with the campus, both the employees and with the students.”

But Jergins doesn’t believe that parking is the most prevalent issue at Tarleton, at least not once the semester is well underway.

“I will tell you that the parking challenges are really kind of short lived,” Jergins said. “It’s about a three week period of really having challenges with parking as far as having enough space for everybody to park. Now, people will disagree with that because they can’t park right up next to the facility they are trying to get to. But the folks that did the study looked at occupancy at the peak times and found that it really is a short lived problem… After things kind of settle down, it’s not as big of a problem.”

Jergins said one part of the problem might be that employees have reserved spaces, regardless of whether or not they use them.

“I think part of the challenge that we have right now is that everyone, every employee has a reserve space in a reserve lot, and that may not be the most efficient way to use our space,” Jergins explained. “So we’ll be looking at how we’ll address that.”

Next fall may see some solutions to the challenges, but not much to the current system as a whole.

“I’m not sure that we’ll see a significant change in the parking system next fall other than we are working very diligently to establish a shuttle system for offsite apartment complexes that would run continuously during the day and into the early evening,” Jergins said. “We’re looking at adding some temporary additional lots to allow folks to be shuttled into the campus on the golf carts to use some of our resources that way.”

The success of the shuttle system, Jergins said, will depend on students’ willingness to use it.

“I think one of the challenges we face is Texans don’t necessarily embrace public transportation,” Jergins said. “We all like to use our own personal vehicles.”

The parking troubles on campus ultimately stem from the growth of the university, which seems to be at the core of many of Tarleton’s recent issues. The additional housing and rapid increase in the student body has simply soaked up the parking spaces.

“We have leased about 1,000 spaces off campus, but we still need more housing so we built Heritage,” Jergins said. “We’re designing the next one to start construction in June.”

The challenges of parking on campus will not be solved overnight, and it is clear that cooperation between students and administration will be vital in satisfying students and faculty alike.