Business school's move will complicate parking for faculty, students

By Lake Morris
Edited by Gwen Weiler

A good parking spot at the USC campus is about to get a little tougher to find with a little-noticed shift in the location of the new $90 million Darla Moore School of Business.

Faculty in and around the Coliseum are unhappy about the move, which puts the school squarely on the Greene Street lot between the Coliseum and the Koger Center. The move will mean fewer and possibly more expensive parking spaces.

With this move, the Greene Street lot's 83 spaces – 77 for faculty and six for buying tickets at the Coliseum ticket office – will disappear, and an unknown number of parking spots in a large lot at Park and Greene streets will be taken up by crews and construction equipment from this June to May 2013.

The Coliseum ticket office has heard nothing from the university about what the move means for the office or ticket buyers, Coliseum building director Sid Kenyon said.

The ticket office handles sales for the Koger Center and Drayton Hall.

One goal is to better use the 1,400-space Discovery Plaza garage at College and Park streets, which was completed in fall 2008, said Jeffrey Lamberson, USC's director of facilities planning and construction.

Students and faculty haven't been paying the $320 per semester for the Discovery parking pass, Lamberson said, and "if you go over there, it might be half full."

The $15 million garage and a companion, the Horizon garage, were built as part of USC's Innovista project. As of June 30, about $18 million in bonds remained outstanding on the projects, bonds that Ed Walton, associate vice president for resource planning said are designed to be repaid by parking revenues.

The bonds are not a direct university obligation, but were issued by the Columbia Parking Facilities Corp., which was created to build and manage the garages.

Charles Bierbauer, dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies in the Coliseum, said it was clear some parking would be lost no matter where the new business school was located.

"We knew that from the start," Bierbauer said. "You hope with the influx of business school faculty and students that there are some accommodations."

But the new business school should add to the vitality of the western end of campus, he said.

Some faculty are not looking forward to the parking changes.

"I'm not happy in the least," said advertising and public relations professor Lisa Sisk, who teaches in the Coliseum. "It's already challenging to find a space in our lot on the Blossom Street side. This obviously will have a huge impact on the availability in that lot when the other faculty lot at the Coliseum closes."

Sisk, who said she only recently found out about the move through word of mouth, said she doesn't plan on using the Discovery garage, but thinks she may have to because the remaining N-permit faculty lot on the Blossom Street side of the Coliseum won't be able to absorb the added traffic.

Andy Gillentine, a professor in the Sport and Entertainment Management Department in the Coliseum, said he also would avoid the garage and find somewhere else to park.

"Any time you lose parking spaces it is going to be difficult. It is important that we as a university are aware of any inconveniences and help minimize the impact of those moves," he said.

Journalism professor John Besley said he has been at other schools where it was much harder to find parking. Besley, who parks in the large Z-permit lot behind the Coliseum, said he thought something would be worked out.

Graduate students are concerned about losing their allotted spaces behind the Coliseum once the faculty parking on Greene Street is eliminated and construction equipment starts taking up parking spots.

They fear they, too, will be forced to decide whether to pay for the Discovery garage or roll the dice and find a spot in the Coliseum lots with the influx of business school faculty, staff and students.

Benjamin Bullock, president of the graduate student association, said he hoped parking services would make another lot available for grad students if this happens, but neither the association nor USC student government had been contacted about the move.

"Many grad students live off of stipends or some other assistance, and I doubt that too many of us can afford to park in the garage every day," he said.

Derek Huggins, associate vice president for transportation, did not return several phone calls seeking comment.

The original plan to move the business school to Greene and Park streets was changed by Moore and her architect because they thought the new location would give the four-story, 250,000-square-foot building a better foundation and make it more visible, Lamberson said.

The business school is currently in The Close-Hipp building on the east side of campus. It will be used as a training center by the Justice Department, which will pay the university $106 million over a 20-year lease. The university will borrow $65 million against that to pay for most of the new school, Lamberson said.