The Athletic Department has been fielding a plethora of concerned phone calls since announcing a new plan to implement more parking fees for football games in 2011.
Previously free lots around the Highland Road, River Road, Gourrier Avenue and Tower Drive areas will now be first-come, first-served paid lots.
Senior Associate Athletic Director Herb Vincent said the administration anticipated the feedback and didn’t take the decision lightly. He said the Athletic Department has been studying new ways to generate revenue for more than a year.
“Any time you go from zero to charging something, you’re going to get complaints about it,” Vincent said. “We’ve also gotten a lot of comments saying we thought you would have done this a long time ago.”
One of the common complaints concerned the logistics of implementing paid parking, Vincent said.
“If you’ve been parking in those areas, you don’t have to do anything different than what you’ve done before, except get a parking tag for your car,” Vincent said. “If you live in Houston and you’ve always driven in overnight and you arrive at 4 a.m. and you park on campus, you can still do that. … I think in people’s minds they envision this long line of traffic trying to arrive just before kickoff and get to the game. But those lots there fill up early and start filling up Friday evening.”
The new parking fees are expected to bring in about $500,000 a year and will go into the general athletic fund, which will help pay for tailgating trash left behind after football games.
“We think it may help solve some of the real trash problems of campus,” Vincent said. “We’re going to invest some of this money back into the tailgating experience.”
Other universities have also gone through recent changes during the economy’s recent recession. For instance, Georgia established tailgating regulations on campus, only allowing tailgaters to set up a few hours before the game in certain areas.
Vincent said the administration decided to implement parking fees instead of putting regulations on tailgating.
“We don’t want to get into any of that,” Vincent said. “We understand that charging for parking is a change, but … it’ll allow more restrooms in the area, more cleanup opportunities. We want to keep tailgating going for many years because that’s a tradition at LSU and important to the culture of the whole gameday experience.”
LSU has also asked the Athletic Department to come up with an extra $1.4 million per year to pay for the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student-Athletes, effective immediately. The University previously paid for the Cox Center before, but because of budget cuts, can no longer do so.
 
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Contact Katherine Terrell at [email protected]