Question:

"I heard somewhere that Parking and Transportation Services makes the most money out of all the UA auxiliaries. Is that true?"

÷ Marguerite McDonald, creative writing and linguistics senior

Answer:

I asked Dick Roberts, assistant vice president and budget director of the UA.

"Not true," Roberts said. I should have known, as well as anyone who knows about the UA.

The largest auxiliary of the UA is Arizona Athletics. Their budget is roughly around $30.5 million a year, Roberts said.

After the UofA Bookstore, Arizona Student Unions, Residence Life, the Center for Computing and Information Technology and Facilities Management lies Parking and Transportation Services.

The auxiliary's budget runs to about $13.2 million, Roberts said.

So what does PTS do with all that money? My first notion was that it was planning a takeover of some forsaken fourth-world country, like Easter Island or something. But true to form, that idea was shot down.

First off, all PTS gets from the UA is $40,000 ÷ less than one-half of 1 percent of its operational budget. Believe it or not, the primary source of revenue is not parking citations (contributing 11 percent), but parking permits and visitor parking (contributing 76 percent), said Patrick Kass, the director of PTS.

On that, it should be said that the director is actually quite friendly over the phone. Maybe it's just me, but I was expecting heavy breathing and digitized speech, a la Darth Vader.

And believe it or not, PTS parking permit prices aren't quite so "evil," at least on a relative scale.

In a panel two weeks ago, Kass compared parking prices at the UA to those in Tucson's downtown. A garage lot at the UA is $450 per year, but compare that to the $600-$900 in the city.

A garage permit at the University of California, Berkeley, is almost three times as much, at $1,300 per year. A Berkeley surface lot, running at $900 a year, is more than three times the UA's $235 a year cost for a Zone 1 permit. All of that money goes into paying off the parking garages, which cost $11,000 per space.

PTS also supports the Cat Tran, transportation for people with disabilities and subsidies for bus passes. In the end, I'm sorry you got a ticket, Marguerite, but at least you know where your $40 went. Case closed.

÷ Investigation by Detective Kris Cabulong
catcalls@wildcat.arizona.edu