FSU Parking Permits Needed to Avoid Tickets

Yelling, throwing Gatorade bottles, or picking a fight will not prevent your car being ticketed if it doesn’t have that little white parking pass on the rearview mirror. At Frostburg State University, students and faculty must pay to obtain a parking permit to be able to park their car in a designated parking lot. Permits are now available for purchase at the university billing office in Pullen Hall for $40 and expire July 1, 2015.

On September 8, the grace period for parking anywhere without a permit expired. From now on, parking tickets will be issued to anyone parking illegally. Little do students know that the people who write these tickets are just like them. They are regular students and may blend in with the crowd.  They are watching the cars and students so; students need to more viligiant and less sneaky about parking where he or she wants to.

Like always, there will be people who try to get past the fines. Parking ticket writers are trained, and some have been doing the job for years.  Techniques like trying to hide a permit, using an expired one, or making a fake permit are not going to work this year. If the ticket writer does not see a permit, then they will write a ticket that can be traced to the car’s plate number. The ticket writer can easily scan the code in their machine and see if a permit is real or fake, and if it is expired, that will show up on the portable screen.

This year’s parking passes start with the letter J, and any other letter is considered expired. Park in the right places and be aware of the different red and black permit lots. Ticket writers are out there in the rain or snow, and the tickets are waterproof, so potential ticket dodgers have a difficult job.

After obtaining a permit follow the guidelines FSU has assigned for the designated lots.  For example, Annapolis requires a red permit well as state street lot and Cumberland lot require a black permit. Students who park in the wrong lot will be issued a ticket. Students do have the option to fight tickets to attempt to prove that they do not deserve to be charged.

If issued a ticket, students have the option to pay it in one business day, cutting the fine to only half of the original rate, which is normally $25. A ticket varies from lot to lot but for Annapolis lot it will cost a student $15, for the handicap lot $100 and the other lots $30. Tickets will not go away. If not paid, tickets can lead to revocation of a driver’s license.

Featured picture of parking map belongs to FSU.