Year old tickets shouldn’t be sent out now

Jasmyn Elliott/Staff Writer

Apparently, the Department of Parking and Transportation is stuck in traffic when it comes to processing paperwork.

One of the highlights of my weekend was receiving a notice from the department stating that my grandfather has received a ticket for overstaying his time in metered parking. This would normally make sense, but the timing concerns me.

According to the documentation, this infraction occurred in April 2011. Yet, this is the first time the department has even alerted my grandfather of it.

I cannot for the life of me come up with a good reason for why it took over a year for the department to process a simple parking ticket.

Meanwhile, recent University alumnus Joel Delgado is fighting the department for his diploma, which is being withheld for a citation that he paid off almost two years ago. Each time he logs on to check the status of the matter, the website states that his record is clear; the department, however, begs to differ, which hints at a lack of unity between the two systems.

One could say that these issues are a result of students, staff members and visitors procrastinating with paying their tickets, hoping that they will miraculously disappear without consequence. I have to argue against this idea, considering that when I called repeatedly to get an explanation, no one took my call.

I am no stranger to playing catch-up when it comes to paperwork.

However, the fact that Parking and Transportation is over a year behind on paperwork, and is unresponsive to individuals who are actively trying to clean up their record, is unacceptable.

This is an obvious symptom of a much bigger problem in the department, which is most likely a combination of being understaffed and poor time management.

As a result, the department is quickly gaining a reputation for blind-siding students with parking citations that can influence their eligibility for graduation — that is, if they’re even a student, in reference to my grandfather’s case.

I truly hope the Department of Parking and Transportation takes note of this and gets their act together. It’s one thing to be a little behind; it’s another to take more than a year to hold an individual accountable for an infraction, and a truly minor one at that.

It will take more than telling students where and how to park their car to fix this level of incompetence.