The little white trailer sits tucked away from the rest of the construction site where K-State’s parking garage will soon stand. The room remains quiet and vacant with the occasional interruption by workers coming and going between the manager’s office and the door outside.
    Through the open door stands a long wooden table built into the wall while a thick stack of detailed drawings lay open upon it. The drawings are plans for the parking garage being built in front of the K-State Student Union.
    Mike Gibson, project manager for the parking garage, sits at the desk in the center of the room casually leaning back, smiling broadly.
    “The tornado did kind of impede progress,” he said, “but we have had a stretch of real good weather and have taken full advantage of it.”
    Gibson said they would not compromise quality for speed. The parking garage should be done in April, said Darwin Abbott, K-State Parking Services Director.
    “If the weather holds for the next couple of days, we’ll have some large areas of concrete poured,” Abbott said.
    The concrete areas are the floors to the second level of the parking garage.    
    The first floor of the garage will be partially underground. There will be three stories on top of this first floor.
    Abbott said the garage was designed to be lower than the surrounding buildings so people could still see Nichols Hall, the Alumni Center, the Student Union, Calvin Hall and Kedzie Hall.
    The completed garage will hold about 1,200 parking spaces.
    In the old parking lot that used to be in front of the Union, there were 200 student stalls, Abbott said. In the new parking garage, there will be 500 student stalls. Prices for student permits will cost no more than student spaces elsewhere on campus, Abbott said.
    Abbott said there will also be timed stalls for students. The prices for meters and student stalls are still being considered. The rest of the stalls in the parking garage will be for faculty, staff, visitors and meter parking.
    Abbott said the meter parking for students will particularly cater to people who do not need to be on campus all day, like student teachers, for instance.
    “Just as we did with meters, we have a constituency of students who don’t have to be here all the time,” Abbott said.
    Instead of buying a permit, those students can just pay for a short period of time in the meter spots in the garage.
    “That’s still student parking as far as I’m concerned because that’s still helping that group of people,” Abbott said. “They don’t have any other need beyond that.”
    Not only will the parking garage be functional and cater to the campus’s various needs, Gibson said he believes the structure will look nice overall.
    “This is going to be one of the premiere parking structures in the midwest, if not the nation,” Gibson said.

3 comments

Sanders

Mon Sep 1 2008 20:46

I think that this parking garage is a blight on the campus. I can just see it now, "Welcome to K-State. Here we have our Union...erm...Parking Garage, notice the lovely cube shape and how it blocks out the sun. Beautiful." Also it's nice that students who won't be able to use it are paying for it. Lovely.

Mike

Sun Aug 31 2008 20:09

Why is it that a big project like the parking structure has small working crews visible to the public when a small project like the drive by the Chapel and Fairchild has more manpower and progress shown?

John

Fri Aug 29 2008 12:07

Biggest waste of university funds ever!

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