Implementing a Parking Fee

When Kelsey, Dmitri and I began brainstorming our project for implementing a parking fee and using part of the revenue generated to further subsidize metro passes for Oxy students I thought it was a relatively straight forward project. I was told that the President backed the idea and I thought to myself that this project would be easy and we would have it up and running in no time, especially considering most colleges have such a system already in place. Much to my surprise, we found out that implementing a parking fee required a new full-time campus safety officer as well as thousands of dollars for signage. We managed to circumvent the large expense of an additional officer by proposing a new student employment position. Then we tried to set up a meeting with President Veitch, which was unsuccessful. Recently, we have been trying to coordinate a meeting with all of the various department heads that have an interest or say in the project, which is a surprisingly large group. This project, although I am confident we will accomplish our goals, has demonstrated to me the increased time and difficulty that having a bureaucratic system implies. There are many levels that have to give their input and have a say as to how someting will be completed. This is both an advantage and disadvantage to our system, hopefully everyone's interests are accounted for to minimize the possibility of a negative outcome for a certain group. Yet I now understand the difficulty of pursuing change because what we are all experiencing with our individual projects are a mere microcosm of what happens in Washington and all over the world every day.