Purdue Student Government opposes city's parking ordinance

A parking meter ordinance is currently going through the West Lafayette City Council that could create hundreds of paid parking meters around Purdue’s campus. Purdue Student Government passed an ordinance to oppose the parking meter Wednesday night’s.

PSG's parking meter ordinance, authored by PSG Senators Olivia Williams and Sreeya Ramasamy, asks the City of West Lafayette to reconsider the ordinance.

“There’s four, five streets with over 1000 parking spots, which people mainly rely on to park their cars for a long time. For some commuters, they park their car there for weeks,” said Ramasamy.

PSG voted to oppose the parking meter ordinance unanimously, several senators calling the City's ordinance unfavorable to students due to limited available free parking on campus.

“Students rely on this free parking. In my opinion, I believe this parking ordinance is just not the best for the student body and PSG has the power to be able to influence that and make changes in the community to better serve the students,” Ramasamy said.

Student liaisons

A bill, written by PSG Senators Owen Martins, Dario Abusada and PSG President Jason Packard, aims to add student liaisons to PSG. If passed, liaisons are experts in a certain field that would assist PSG in creating legislation for a particular area

“When important issues come up, such as voting, parking, etc, and we take a stance on it, we want to be as informed as possible,” Packard said. “There’s not always a fast enough connection though, but many Purdue organizations obtain this knowledge immediately, so it’s important we work with them.”

Packard said the main goal of this bill is to establish a connection that will help strengthen legislation.

“By working with these organizations, we will be able to be more efficient rather than separately accomplishing similar things on similar timelines,” Packard said.

The main issues senators had with this bill is how they would fairly include every student organization.

“If we want to be equitable and not discriminatory we would have to create 1,000s of rules across campus,” said Senator Lynlee Rice.

Another issue some senators brought up was that the legislation said the senate would have to appoint all the liaisons which would take a lot of time.

To fix this problem, PSG voted to amend the writing of the bill from stating “appoint” to “establish.”

Food accessibility

Another important issue discussed during the meeting was the Creating Food Accessibility Ad-Hoc Committee, written by Ramasamy.

“The Greater Lafayette and West Lafayette is considered a food desert, feeding over 40,000 students. Yet, the Target is always out of stock and the nearest grocery store is five miles away,” Ramasamy said. “With the new housing development, we’ve been losing a lot of food options close to campus as well.”

Ramasamy said she believes passing this bill will lead to potential solutions for this problem and will result in growth and development for the campus.