Students at Gainesville State College will be able to stop circling the Gainesville campus parking lot like vultures in August when the school opens its new two-story parking deck.
The $4.5 million parking deck will add 381 free parking spaces to the campus’s existing 1,704 coveted spots, Gainesville State College spokeswoman Sloan Jones said.
The commuter college’s enrollment peaked last fall at 6,097 students, most of whom were scrambling to find a place to park in time for class, she said.
"We were just totally busting at the seams," Jones said.
Jones said this past school year, hundreds of students were parking in a makeshift gravel lot and on the campus’s amphitheater lawn.
"It should work out now where we’re covered," she said.
Fall 2008’s enrollment numbers, which were the highest the Gainesville campus had ever seen, prompted the parking deck ground breaking in November. And Jones said college leaders anticipate enrollment to grow 4 percent to 8 percent this fall.
A $35 parking deck fee was tacked on to students’ semester fees in the fall of 2008 to fund the deck construction. Students likely will continue to pay for the deck through semester fees for the next 19 years, Jones said.
Gainesville State student Brandon Erickson, 25, said he’s glad he will now have a place to park at school.
"When I was enrolling last fall, there was definitely some circling going on," he said. "I even got a parking ticket one time for parking in a visitor’s space."
But Erickson said the deck only solves half of the commuter campus’s logistical problems.
"Traffic is another thing, though. It’s not good stuff getting out of here at lunch time," he said. "If it were up to me, I would of taken that money and built a four-lane road here instead of a parking lot."
Gainesville State College President Martha Nesbitt said she’s well aware of the noontime traffic clogging the campuses few roads.
"It’s not so much getting onto the campus, it’s getting off," she said.
Nesbitt said she’s been working with the state Department of Transportation to create a third outlet from the campus onto Mundy Mill Road near the college’s bell tower. She said a new road there also would help alleviate traffic at the adjacent Lanier Technical College.
The new exit, and the funding for it, Nesbitt said, is likely still a few years away.