By Cade Kennedy, Sports Editor
As parking problems begin to rise at Northwestern, campus police officers are cracking down on violators.
While there have been some isolated incidents with students parking in the wrong spot before, Dennis Kilmer, the police chief at Northwestern, said the issue is continuing to grow.
“We’ve had a parking problem since Cunningham Hall was remodeled at the first of the year,” Kilmer said.
“That kind of caused a backup in parking because we didn’t have that kind of parking, but once we got that up and running, we let it go for a while and gave everybody warnings and said, ‘Hey, park where you’re supposed to be or we’re going to start issuing some tickets.’”
Despite the temporary traffic conundrum caused by the remodeling of Cunningham Hall, the problem seemed to resolve itself. However, the past few weeks have shown otherwise.
“It was OK there for a while after it opened,” Kilmer said. “We didn’t seem to have too many issues, but now that we’ve gone into the colder months, I think it’s people not wanting to walk across campus going to park in the parking spots.”
The south side of campus is not the only area that has had problems pertaining to parking, as two other sides of the campus have also had parking issues.
“If someone has a dorm sticker in their window, they can’t come up and park in the commuter parking or the horseshoe for staff,” Kilmer said. “We’re starting to see a little bit more of that.”
The latest revisions to the campus parking map came in October. Specific instructions for where students, faculty and staff are supposed to park were added. The horseshoe area around Herod Hall has no parking for students, as the space is intended for employee parking. Commuter parking is mainly found on the east side of campus, according to the map, as the areas around Vinson Hall are intended for those with a commuter parking sticker.
“I have also seen an uptick in people not having any decals at all,” Kilmer said. “That becomes a safety issue for the whole campus. If I have a vehicle that doesn’t have a parking sticker, I don’t know if it is someone that belongs on campus or not.
Kilmer added: “We do have some visitor parking spots in certain places where, if you just have to be in a certain place for just a couple of minutes, you can get into one of those visitor parking places and get out. It’s not that we’re just out there giving tickets all the time. We do give some warnings.”