(Photo: Emily Schneider)
By: Sally Andarge, Staff Reporter
Two weekends ago Regis University held the Rail Jam event in Parking Lot 5, but not without a cost to some students. Weekend Programming and Student Activities got together to bring snow to Regis, along with food trucks, rails for riding and landing, and vendors there to sell some of their winter gear. The rails and snow made for an almost realistic snowboarding experience.
Now, I know what you must be thinking: How was there space for all of this? Well, Residence Life and Student Activities got together in an effort make space for the event by making students move their cars. They did this by sending an email to students who were parked in “reserved areas” the day before the event. The email was sent at 1 p.m. requesting that students move their cars immediately. One hour later students began to get calls if they hadn’t yet moved their cars.
The first call was from one of the event planners explaining that the University would be issuing tickets and towing cars to lot 6 if their cars were not moved by 3:30 p.m., claiming that students should have received emails earlier in the week explaining why they needed to move their cars, even though no such email exists.
Now if you are one of the many people on campus whose day does not end at 3 o’clock, you probably had no idea what was going on or why your phone was being blown up. Finally, the last resort was having one of the ticket distributors call the remaining students threatening to ticket people and flag cars for towing!
As one may expect, this did not go over well with many students. A parking pass for a single semester runs for $200 and $400 for a full year, so one would expect a little more accommodation in situations like this considering how much we pay for parking alone.
Overall, we can agree the entire situation could have been handled much better. Event or not, nothing warrants threats.