LSU Parking & Transportation announced there are no plans to increase parking spots despite growing concerns from students and faculty at the Faculty Senate meeting on Tuesday. They also have no plans to build any additional parking garages on campus.
The communications specialist for the office, Broty Stelly said there are “around 45,000 students, 2,000 faculty and almost 4,000 staff” on campus.
“We’re looking at around 50 to 52,000 people that make up the Baton Rouge LSU campus,” Stelly said. “According to the Bureau of the Census, we are technically a small metropolitan city.”
Stelly said the battle for land on a campus with this many people is impossible to win. The Campus Mobility plan that started in 2019 is LSU’s solution.
The plan is aimed at providing a more pedestrian-friendly campus and shift more people to use the Park & Geaux lots. LSU wants to prioritize safety and accessibility for all its community members.
They expect a near car-less campus in the next 10 to 15 years.
“It kind of outlines where LSU is going in terms of not only the miniature city that it is, but the academic institution that we strive to be,” Stelly said.
Starting next semester, several parking lots across campus designated for faculty will close to make way for construction staging for the new library. LSU expects to break ground on the library at the end of the spring semester.
As the parking presentation concluded, there was significant faculty pushback against the university for pushing the Park & Geaux. Faculty members questioned how the students would get to and from their cars in a reasonable amount of time without continuously missing classes.
“There is a very clear impact on our student life with this lack of parking,” said one faculty member during the Q&A portion of the presentation. “You have to take into consideration that [most] seniors, juniors and sophomores are not living on campus. They are commuting.”
At the start of the meeting, students from the organization Students for a Democratic Society sat in the front row while one student made a public comment concerning the LSU presidential search committee.
Zane Sutor-Benfield, a sophomore majoring in screen arts, spoke about the “unfairness” among members on the committee. After he spoke, the students handed letters to the executive members of the Faculty Senate asking them to deliver the letters to the search committee for review.
