For the first time, students living in the Station at Mill Point have to pay for a parking permit.
Students who live in Mill Point have previously never had to pay at all for parking, but they were only allowed to park in the Mill Point lot. This year, Mill Point parking permits cost $160, and students will be allowed to park in Colonnades, Innovation Quad and Schar Center Hunt B lots in addition to their own.
According to Campus Police Chief Joe LeMire, the new Mill Point parking permit comes after he received multiple complaints from students living in Mill Point who were unable to park anywhere on campus without being ticketed.
“I started talking to some people that lived in Mill Point who were athletes, some had internships and jobs,” LeMire said. “They were saying that, ‘The Mill Point is free, but I'm only allowed to park at Mill Point. So if I have to come back and park at Mill Point, but I still have to get over to Sankey Hall because I'm a business major. I can't make it. Either I have to tell my boss, I have to leave my job, or I have to tell my professor that I'm late.’”
According to campus safety and police, as of Aug. 21, 219 Mill Point parking permits were purchased, and 35 still need to be picked up. As of Aug. 25, Campus Safety and Police did not have updated numbers on parking passes purchased in the first week of classes. This compares to 264 permits picked up last year. During the 2022-23 academic year, 318 students were living in the Station at Mill Point.
There are 344 total unreserved spots in the Mill Point lot available for parking.
LeMire said the new permit costs the same as all other neighborhood parking permits, except for the Global neighborhood.
Senior Matt Boyle is going into his second year of living in Mill Point and said while he understands other students’ frustration with limited parking, the additional parking isn’t worth the price.
“It just feels like a needless cash grab, when in reality the parking permits was working fine from Mill Point up until this year,” Boyle said.
Some students are more frustrated that the university didn’t notify them ahead of returning to campus. Senior Maddie Johnson has also lived in Mill Point for two years and said she specifically chose the neighborhood to save money on parking.
She learned about the new cost from an email reminding her to pay for the pass. Now, Johnson said she is asking campus police for a payment plan to ease the unexpected cost of the permit.
“I've been working all summer and I've been trying to save that money,” Johnson said. “I know a lot of other students have too. It's just something that wasn't expected, something that I didn't plan on.”
Like Johnson, Boyle said he wishes he could have been notified in advance so he could have budgeted for the additional expense.
Both Boyle and Johnson said for them, the additional parking lots are not close to their classes. Johnson said she’s frustrated that she had no choice but to pay $160, even though she won’t benefit the way students with classes on that side of campus will.
When Johnson heard about the change, she reached out to Vice President of Student Life Jon Dooley to ask why the change was necessary. Johnson said Dooley directed her to public transportation options, such as Link Transit and Elon Express, as an alternative to bringing her car to campus. To Johnson’s dismay, neither service stops at Mill Point.
“My new battle is adding a bus stop to Mill Point, just because every other residence on campus that is owned by Elon University, like Mill Point, has a bus stop, and we don't,” Johnson said.
But LeMire doesn’t think a bus stop will solve the problems fixed by the new parking permits.
“If you picture a shuttle bus going over there, and the shuttle bus comes back by the post office and they go through the lights and everything, by the time they get to campus, some students said I could walk faster than that,” LeMire said.
According to an email from program assistant Marcia Dodson, campus police began ticketing cars without parking passes on Aug. 22. The email said the ticket fines for parking in Mill Point without a pass have also increased from $50 to $100.
LeMire said this increase comes after continuous violations, including parking in restricted spots where faculty members live on campus.
“It was being violated enough times that we had to tell people, ‘No, we're serious about this, don't park in these areas for safety reasons, don't park in these areas because they're restricted,’” LeMire said.
Historically, LeMire said, Mill Point had free parking because it seemed very far away from the center of campus when the university was smaller. But when the university started evaluating changing the permits, they measured the distance from the different neighborhoods to the center of campus and Belk Library. LeMire said they found Mill Point is about the same distance from campus as the Danieley Center, where students are charged for parking passes.