Being a good Southern California boy I have always known that the University of California, Santa Barbara was a party school. Its right on the beach. In fact, the word is that on one day a student ran into a Poly Sci class and yelled “surf’s up” and the place emptied.
It only figured that the next step would be valet parking. The word on the street is that because of construction a number of lots at UCSB have been closed and therefore a large number of spaces lost. Fortunately, the construction is for parking structures.
While the structures are in mid debauch, they are stack parking cars. If your car is not in the front row, you have to leave your key, and after 9 AM, they will actually park you car for you. And its all FREE.
Considering the price of tuition, I guess valet parking is appropriate. The bad news is that the valet assist operation will end in December when the new structures open.
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Trouble in the Big Easy
Read it and weep – according to the Times Picayune (don’tcha just love that name) a number of parking companies and suppliers are hip deep in lawyers and problems over their new parking system, to be installed soon, hopefully.
The mayor, yielding to pressure to provide the contract to a minority firm, selected a vendor that didn’t provide enough meters to cover the city’s spaces. Other, lower providers, did. Standard Parking, Reino, World Wide, Parkeon, ACS, Central, and a local firm Parking Solutions LLC are among those listed in this article.
My correnspondents tell me that this has been going on since last April however the court is just now getting around to ruling (see info near end of the story.)
There are some very prominent parking names in this article, no need to belabor them here, you can click above if you are interested. Suffice it to say that eveyone in a town the size of New Orleans is related to someone…
My call…It will be resolved in favor of the city and New Orleans will have its meters as ordered. But then, I was wrong once before.
Makes you yearn for gumbo and crawdads.
2 Responses
Good luck, I certainly will look forward to the dialogue. My first thought…………. Look out vendors when we all start communicating.
The interesting thing about this article is not the common political posturing used to continue to get elected — it is the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that the ruse used by many governenmental agencies of making multi-million dollar purchases with RFP’s or Professional contracts that allow the low bid process to be avoided is NOT and was NOT allowed to be used as an excuse to avoid the normal public bid laws – WOW!!
Finally a judge stood up and said “NO!” to one of the biggest ways that politicians and other politically motivated public employees supercede the normal bid process and the scrutiny it requires – they just make their giant purchases with RFP’s and make themselves and/or their buddies the judging committee and then “presto” they get exactly what they want for whatever reasons they want to use – if the public knew how many billions of dollars are wasted using the RFP type process they would go nuts – but the best or worst thing (depending on which side of the fence you are sitting on) about’s RFP is that the agencies in charge cannot be challenged like a normal bid – how convenient