Bellarmine & parking issues with abutting neighborhoods

BELKNAP/DEER PARK
University will discourage parking on side streets
Neighbors say they feel crowded

By Martha Elson
The Courier-Journal July 4, 2001

Bellarmine University has agreed to tell its students not to park on side streets in the neighborhood
around Douglass Boulevard and has said it will monitor the area to try to discourage the practice.

The Louisville-Jefferson County Planning Commission's Land, Development and Transportation
Committee asked for cooperation from Bellarmine recently while discussing how many parking spaces
the university needs to provide.

Nancy Braxton-White of Douglass Boulevard and Mary Ann Buckner of Princeton Avenue said at the
committee's meeting that people have trouble parking in front of their houses and that they think students
are to blame.

''You're a neighborhood university, so you have to be mindful of these things,'' Jack Dulworth,
commission chairman, told Bellarmine officials.

''We're not totally responsible,'' said Tom Fisher, the university's director of facility management, noting
that parking on side streets is public. ''We do police the campus, but we don't police the neighborhood.''

Fisher did agree to start monitoring it. The college, however, does not have authority over off-campus
parking.

Aside from the parking issue, ''you are good neighbors,'' Braxton-White said. ''We enjoy the campus
there.''

But Buckner said parking has been a problem for years.

''I just don't like it. I feel like Bellarmine needs to provide more parking.''

Residents of Old Louisville have voiced similar complaints about University of Louisville students'
parking on neighborhood streets.

Fisher said on-campus parking used to be free for students but the university started charging about $40
annually this year. Faculty and staff were already paying to park. The committee asked the university to
consider going back to free parking for students.

Bellarmine's spring enrollment was 1,455 full-time students and 598 part-timers, according to Christopher
French, a commission planner.

Bellarmine came before the committee because it is completing a $7.3 million, 200-bed dormitory that is
scheduled to open this fall. The dorm normally would be required to have 35 parking spaces, but the
university wanted to provide only 24, French said.

The commission staff studied peak parking usage and reported that the overall parking requirement
would be about 2,200 spaces, compared with the 1,387 provided on the campus, on Newburg Road.

The committee was asked to determine whether the university needed a parking variance and concluded
that it did not -- because of the unlikelihood that all the spaces would be needed at the same time.

Fisher said that the university encourages students to park on campus but that some would still park in
the neighborhood even if the university built a 10-story garage.

Side streets are closer to classroom buildings than some spaces on campus, John Spugnardi, the
university's director of public relations, said after the meeting. He added that some students park in the
neighborhood because they live there.