The SBFA Board sent the following message to Susannah Scott, Divisional Chair of the UCSB Academic Senate, on June 1, 2021.
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Dear Susannah,
The UCSB Faculty Association Board has been very concerned about changes to the Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP) that were announced a few months ago and are now being implemented (see the May 19 email from TAP Director James Wagner). We know that you have received a letter from our Graduate Students’ Union detailing the many objections raised and alternatives proposed by students, Staff, and ourselves, concerning these changes, so we will not waste your time rehearsing them again. Suffice it to say that we share the analysis of the situation presented in that letter and petition, and we urge the Senate both 1) to allow the Graduate Students to speak at the next Assembly meeting of June 3, and 2) to commission the appropriate Senate committees to examine the situation and support alternatives to this detrimental change of policy.
In addition to supporting the students’ position regarding the importance of maintaining the flexibility of the program, we would like to offer an interim compromise solution. The announced change converts the 57 freely divisible hours of free parking per quarter allotted to each TAP participant into a mere 6 daily increments. As the students’ petition notes, this change will force students, staff, and faculty, who were previously able to come to campus for a few hours at a time (generally off peak), but need to do so for more days per quarter than 6, to abandon TAP and purchase quarter parking. Once paid for, many are likely use their permit to drive to campus more frequently, and occupy parking spots for much longer than before. Since TPS continues to refuse to implement a new system with a flexible hourly capability, as an interim solution we suggest that doubling the number of free day passes from 6 to 12 would go a long way in keeping many users in the current TAP program by allowing them to drive to campus at least one day per week, and thus consider not purchasing an annual or quarter permit. The benefits for viability and the environment of retaining users in TAP greatly outweigh the additional revenues that Parking Services is likely to obtain from the changes proposed. This would also buy time for the Senate to explore appropriate solutions that would restore the hourly increments of the current program.
We thank you and hope to see a compromise in this long-stalemated issue before another poorly designed, detrimental program is forced upon the UCSB community without input from its constituencies.
Sincerely,
The UCSB Faculty Association Board