The Texas State University Police Department hired an outside company to overhaul the university’s parking and transportation policies.
UPD and Walker Consultants, the company performing the audit, held several public town halls on parking from Sept. 16-18. At the same time as analyzing parking, Walker Consultants are also looking at making improvements to campus transit, such as the shuttle services.
“Internally, parking’s going to change,” UPD Chief Matthew Carmichael said. “We’re on a new path and this is gonna help us to ensure that we’re taking the right approach.”
According to David Lieb, a member of the Walker Consultant team, Walker started as a parking structure design firm 60 years ago, but now serves as a firm that provides parking consulting to academic institutions as well as private clients. Lieb said he has worked with about 90 colleges and universities since he joined the Walker team.
The audit comes after five years of record enrollment numbers, which have placed increasing strain on parking availability. According to UPD Parking Lt. Michele Fox, as of Sept. 22, the university sold 6,760 purple commuter permits while only having 3,445 commuter spaces available, and 3,178 red restricted permits sold while only having 2,805 spaces for the 2025-26 school year.
According to Carmichael, the audit will analyze the number of parking spaces on campus, permits sold and even different parking permit types offered. Carmichael said that based on the audit, Walker Consultants will recommend policies to bring Texas State in line with “peer institutions.”
“We try to balance the needs of faculty, staff, resident students [and] commuter students. [They] all have legitimate needs to access the campus,” Lieb said. “It is a balancing act to try and do that.”
Lieb said each university he has worked with had similar parking challenges, such as rapid campus growth, before their audits, but that because of the geographical and environmental differences of each campus, parking solutions are different at every location. According to Lieb, one of the most common proposals he has heard is to ban freshman from having cars on campus. He said doing so would require alternatives to driving.
“It does no good to count on pricing or just limiting the number of permits that are sold,” Lieb said. “People have to [have] alternatives. That’s why we are looking at the transit and transportation shuttle system at the same time.”
According to the Walker Consultants team, the goal for parking services should not count on parking citation revenue for funding.
“The goal should be that you don’t have to write tickets,” Lieb said. “The goal is to generate [parking] compliance.”
Carmichael echoed the same sentiment at the Sept. 2 Campus Safety Committee meeting. At the meeting, he proposed revising the way parking citations are priced, so that tickets that are paid off quickly are given a discount instead of the full $40 fee that comes with most citations.
“Our excessive violation fee doesn’t necessarily conform with what happens in parking nationally,” Carmichael said at the Sept. 2 meeting. “That excessive fee usually applies if you do not pay your fines, not if you’ve paid your fines.”
Student Government President Abby Myers proposed that the number of times a discount can be given for paying off a citation be limited to three, with that number resetting if the individual purchases a parking permit of a different type.
“I think operating under the assumption that students are not maliciously trying to park poorly, I would say it should reset, because you’re now experiencing a different kind of parking issue,” Myers said at the Sept. 2 meeting.
While the Campus Safety Committee did approve of Carmichael and Myers’ suggestions, Walker Consultants also plans to look at the pricing structure of citations, meaning the changes suggested at the Sept. 2 meeting may not go into effect.
The Walker Consultants team will also look at changing the enforcement methods parking services use, so enforcement is more consistent. Lieb said that current enforcement leads to people taking the risk, which he called “gambling,” since they may not get a citation every time.
