A new construction project in the Litton Reaves parking lot will leave hundreds of graduate and commuter students without a place to park for the next two years.
The second installment of the ICTAS center, Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, is beginning construction on the parking lot behind Litton Reaves.
Graham Smith, special events coordinator for parking services, said the project is part of a "massive building plan for the next 10 years on campus."
"What is going up now is a fence to block off for the actual construction," Smith said. "In addition to the footprint of the building, the construction workers have to block off extra space for when they drop off materials so that they have space to maneuver around in."
Smith added that this project will take up a "big chunk of the Litton Reaves lot, so it is going to have a huge impact on the students' parking situations, as well as the faculty and staff parking."
"What parking services has done is taken away commuter and graduate parking at the back of Litton Reaves lot and converted it to faculty and staff parking," Smith said. "The displaced students will have to park further up the road in the Smithfield parking lots."
Bo Frazier, assistant manager for parking services, said commuter and graduate students will have more than adequate amounts of parking even without the use of Litton Reaves.
"We have the upper and lower Smithfield lots for students to use," Frazier said. "These lots are not utilized very much at all. There will also be space in the Cage lot, but that is also going to become a construction project, but when that happens, residential students will be shifted to the Chicken Hill lot near the airport."
Frazier added that the Cage lot will also be undergoing several construction projects, such as an addition of a HABB - Human and Agricultural Biosciences Building - and a parking garage.
"That construction in the Cage is only going to take up a portion of the lot for about the next 10 years," Frazier said. "The parking garage will open up a lot of spaces, and that is what we are looking for."
Frazier said parking services has received many inquiries concerning the construction in the Litton Reaves lot, but said parking services has issued many notices about the construction.
"We did put out a notice giving students some direction and providing them with information about the situation as far as alternate locations for parking," Frazier said. "We are doing the best that we can to accommodate people."
Smith added that students are going to have to park further away from campus because of the construction, even though that inconveniences many people.
"This is going to be the trend now, because as new buildings go up, the university wants to site them in the core part of campus to maintain people's ability to walk from building to building within a reasonable time," Smith said.
"All of the new buildings will be clustered within the core parts of campus and in open spaces, which are usually parking lots, so parking is going to be pushed farther and farther out," Smith said.
Frazier said the university is also looking at building an underground walkway from the Cage lot to the Litton Reaves building area.
"As the university grows, parking has to shift around, and we are trying to stay ahead of it," Frazier said. "So far we still have plenty of parking spaces available to people, but we are going to have people complain about the situation no matter what."
The alternate locations for commuter and graduate students who normally park in the Litton Reaves lot are the upper and lower Smithfield lots and the Cage, Frazier said.
"Faculty and staff were also displaced," Frazier said. "We relocated faculty, staff, carpool and TAs within the lot, but the only group we could not accommodate were the commuters and graduate students. There are 500-plus spots in the cage that commuters and graduate students can use; they are just not as close to the buildings."
Frazier added that the new parking situation will "just be a little bit of a farther walk for students, unfortunately."