Ball State students and Muncie residents will be left driving around in circles as City Council members debate around the best way to deal with the new off-campus parking ordinances.The parking ordinances approved last June were supposed to go into effect Aug. 15. However, only half of the parking signs were put up because work was halted when questions arose concerning which sides of certain streets were no-parking zones. For now, students and residents can ignore the signs until the Sept. 12 City Council meeting. Council will vote whether or not to nullify the ordinances at the meeting, City Council member Chuck Leonard said.While he is for getting rid of them, City Council member Alison Quirk said she wants to give them a chance.“It’s difficult. We have a lot of people we are trying to help, and a lot of those people think we aren’t listening to them, and [they think we are] trying to hurt them,” she said.Leonard said he has been against the plan from the beginning and thinks there have been better ideas in the past that dealt with the root of the problem -- too many people in a residence.“Say you have eight or nine students living in a house. So if seven of them have boyfriends or girlfriends, you are going to have 16 cars at a house. It’s going to look like a party even though it’s not,” Leonard said. He said he would rather see the Council bring back an ordinance that was turned down a few years ago restricting the number of unrelated people living together to three. Quirk agrees that one of the problems is the amount of people living in a residence. “These homes were intended to be for single families, and the people probably only had one or two cars. Now, we have turned them into rentals, and families have four or five cars. So we are allowing them to park two cars in the street and the rest has to be in off-street parking,” Quirk said.She also said that another part of the problem is the difficulty police have in identifying cars belonging to residents. Under the new ordinances, police will be able to quickly determine which cars are allowed in certain areas by the permits residents place in their front windows.Cars without tags will still be allowed to park in the two-hour parking, leaving other areas free for residents’ vehicles. Leonard said he doesn’t live near campus and believes more people affected by the ordinances should have been involved in their creation. “They are not very well-thought-out ordinances. Certain people put in a lot of work on them, but for the area they covered, there should have been more work done and more people involved. Instead, we have parking ordinances that affect so many but were created by so few,” Leonard said.He said he thinks the Ball State administration should have been involved in the creation and enforcement of the ordinances. He remembers when his wife attended the university and had to pay parking fines in order to graduate and said he thinks students will ignore off-campus fines.“I don’t know that there is any one solution that is going to make everyone happy. We are just going to have to try things out and see how they work,” Quirk said.
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