University Parking

MUNCIE — Looking for a place to park in a neighborhood near the Ball State University campus? Then you might want to read the signs and keep in mind whether you’re in the red or yellow zone, because Mike Maddy will be doing that as well.
Maddy, the city code enforcement officer whose regular patrols include near-campus areas, is tasked with enforcing the zoned parking implemented by the city in 2005 for designated campus-area neighborhoods.
The plan, still in effect, restricts two-hour on-street parking on most residential streets in specified areas to just one side of the street, and provides each house with just one on-street parking sticker color coded for that zone. The sticker allows that car to park on either side of the street — including the two-hour parking side — in that zone; otherwise residents are expected to use off-street parking.
Maddy cuts students some slack during move-in each year and the first few weeks of classes, figuring they’re still learning. By now, however, he’s stepping up enforcement, leaving yellow tickets on the windshields of vehicles parked on the wrong side of the street or in a yard or without a parking sticker in evidence.
Having worked in code enforcement for 36 years, Maddy’s seen many neighborhoods around Ball State shift from single-family homes to student rentals. Therein used to lie the root of the problem of bumper-to-bumper on-street parking, he noted; “If you’re going to rent a house to five or six kids, don’t tell them to park on the street.”
Under the current system, each address is provided with an on-street parking sticker for one car, and the expectation is that property owners will provide off-street parking for the others.
Father-son landlords Eldon Buck and Steve Buck, each of whom owns homes-turned-student-rentals in the campus area, are all for the parking limitations; in fact, they and other members of the University Area Landlord Association encouraged and worked with city officials to get parking restrictions in the area, they said. “This eliminates a lot of the students (who are living in dorms) coming out there (to the neighborhood streets) and leaving their cars there for days,” said Eldon Buck, owner of Buck Rentals.
The alleys in the neighborhoods are conducive to adding off-street parking, which in turn makes the neighborhoods nicer, “not stuffed with cars on both sides of the road,” said Steve Buck of Campus Enterprises.
The street department has given out 150 of the red, green, yellow or blue zone parking stickers so far this year, according to Becky Clark in the department’s office. (Rental property owners and maintenance workers get purple tags that allow them to park along the streets.)

'Your time's up'

Driving around campus-area neighborhoods in his code enforcement SUV (complete with right-side steering wheel and a cup-holder full of pens for writing tickets) on a recent weekday, Maddy was quick to point out the problematic parking jobs along sometimes narrow residential streets: one vehicle parked facing east on the westbound side of the street, another without a sticker parked right next to the sign warning “Yellow permit parking only” and one getting double the tickets, one each for both of those offenses.
For the first few weeks of school, Maddy hadn’t been going after violators staying too long in the two-hour spots, but he said last week that grace period was about to end, as well. (Two-hour parking limits are effective 6 a.m.-6 p.m. weekdays.)
Reactions to traffic tickets vary, from people who don’t take a parking ticket seriously enough to pay it until a notice is sent to the car’s owner — often Mom and Dad for college students — to people who swear at or threaten him or try to ditch the ticket and run when they notice him writing them up. Maddy, who served as a reserve office for the city police years ago, said he’s heard more excuses and taken more abuse over $15 or $20 parking tickets than he used to over speeding tickets.
Muncie and Ball State police are good about responding to back up code enforcement when things get heated, he added. Some parents call the street department to complain after finding out about their children’s parking tickets, but Maddy’s response is, “It’s not my job to babysit these people and make sure their kids know what the rules are.”Signs designating two-hour or color coded zoned parking are liberally placed around their relevant neighborhoods, but Maddy said people will argue they didn’t think the signs six feet away apply to where they parked.
A standard excuse is that “I’ve done it before and I never got caught,” Maddy said, to which his response is, “Well, your time’s up ... This is your day; you won the lottery.”
When the color-coded zoned parking first went into effect, properties were provided with hang-tags for cars, but those tended to be passed around, so the street department now provides landlords with stickers instead. People sometimes will try to get around use of the stickers for just one car as well, taping them to an inside window or other temporary placement, but Maddy said having the sticker anywhere but on the left rear bumper, where it can be easily seen as he patrols the streets, is just courting a ticket under your windshield wiper.
The area around Ball State certainly isn’t the only part of the city with parking issues, nor are parking limitation issues exclusive to Muncie, Maddy said. “All cities got parking problems,” he said.

Plans for Neely

Eventually, the area covered by the zoned/two-hour parking restrictions will actually lose some of its on-street parking, thanks to plans to improve Neely Avenue between the edge of campus and Wheeling Avenue.
That stretch of Neely — which now has two-hour parking on both sides rather than a side dedicated to zoned parking — is slated to get new sidewalks, a bike lane and a center median, which will result in the loss of on-street parking along both sides.
Though the project is being done by the city, it is designed to match the kind of streetscaping that has been done on the campus in recent years, including the stretch of Neely just to the west, between New York and McKinley avenues, according to Muncie Street Department Superintendent Duke Campbell. “We want it to look just like Neely going into Ball State,” he said. The loss of parking was a consideration when looking at the design, but the availability of off-street parking for residents and other options for other drivers answered that concern, Campbell said.Ball State officials are supportive of the plans for Neely, looking upon the similar design as a way to provide “a corridor of connectivity” between the campus and Minnetrista, downtown Muncie and bike trails, said James Lowe, BSU associate vice president of facilities planning.
The Bucks, both of whom own rentals along Neely, are also all for it, despite the loss of the on-street parking. “It will improve the whole neighborhood,” Eldon Buck said. Since landlords have to provide off-street parking for tenants there anyway, the loss of those parking spots will be more than offset by having a nicer entrance to the campus, he added.
Steve Buck said he’d like the city to consider similar improvements for other residential streets in the area as well.
The $1.4 million Neely project includes a 20-percent local match, Campbell said; improvements to stormwater drainage will add another $300,000, but Campbell hopes to work with the Muncie Sanitary District to cut that cost by hopefully tying the Neely work in with the current sewer-separation project along Wheeling.
Campbell expects to be ready to take bids for the work on Neely in July 2014, with construction extending into 2015.