photo by: Mike Yoder

Work has begun on clearing the land for a future 50 million KU Central District development project on a site south of Allen Fieldhouse and to the southeast of Daisy Hill. This view, from Monday, Feb. 22, 2016, looks west from the Oliver Hall parking lot and shows KU's Ellsworth and Hashinger residence halls in background right, Stouffer Place Apartments at center right, which are currently being razed and in the foreground the former site of the KU softball and soccer fields. The Central District project will include a new science building, more apartments and residence halls, parking facilities, a new student union building and a utility plant.

I’ve covered one Kansas University Parking open forum, last fall, and have to say that I was surprised. For all the complaints you hear about campus parking, there was hardly anyone there. At the time, KU Parking Director Donna Hultine said that low attendance was typical at the forums, held each fall and spring.

The spring forum is coming next week, and there will be two sessions. They are noon to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Monday in the Malott Room at the Kansas Union.

A number of proposed changes will be discussed, and most will affect students.

“As the two-plus years of construction in the central district gets underway, there will be significant impacts on parking, especially in student zones,” reads a statement from the KU Parking website. “These proposed changes will help manage demand for existing parking spaces.”

Here are some of the proposed changes, which have been approved by the Parking Commission and may be tweaked before forwarding to the provost for final approval, according to KU Parking. (For reference, here’s a link to the KU Parking map.)

• Convert lot to Park and Ride: Change Lot 301 (on West Campus, next to Shenk fields) back to a less expensive Park and Ride zone, and require freshmen who live off-campus to park there instead of in yellow zone lots.

• Limit yellow parking: Require students to choose which lot or lots they want to park in, and limit the number of permits sold for each area. Students who don’t get into their preferred lot could be placed on a waiting list to be upgraded. (This would affect more than a dozen yellow lots located near the stadium, the student rec center, Allen Fieldhouse and on West Campus.)

• Limit housing parking: Limit permit sales by lottery in all housing zones, not just Daisy Hill. Students who don’t get a spot in a housing lot will be assigned another yellow or Park and Ride lot.

Oliver and McCarthy halls and Jayhawker Towers, especially, will lose a lot of spaces during Central District construction. Parking at GSP and Corbin halls — which already is oversold — will be squeezed even further due to the HERE @ Kansas apartments being built at 11th and Mississippi streets and creating more demand for parking in Lot 94 (east of the stadium) and on city streets.

If you don’t attend the parking forum — which, past attendance statistics indicate you will not — you can still submit feedback. KU Parking offers an online survey as well as a portal for parking proposal feedback. Those are accessible at parking.ku.edu/spring-2016-parking-forum.

*

• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.