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NUCC confronts landlords, parking
The Neighborhood University Community Council (NUCC) met last Monday to address ongoing concerns from students and community members. Student government and university residence halls had representation at the meeting as well as the St. Cloud Police Department, landlords, City Council and other residents.
Parking has been an issue throughout the year and NUCC spent much of the meeting discussing potential parking plans for the future, plans that will not only benefit students but local residents as well. It has been difficult to find a solution that everyone is satisfied with because the neighborhoods, city and university all have different perspectives and needs.
"Parking is a huge issue," said Lori Long, NUCC and City Council member. "As a city we want to try and make it better, but how do you do that?"
Long used the increase in parking fines as an example. What was intended to encourage students and residents to follow parking regulations, had many students feeling that the city wanted to make money off of them.
"Around the entire city we (increased the fines) to get people to obey the parking rules but it gets hard," Long said.
President of NUCC Garner Moffat said the dilemma over winter parking was also addressed. NUCC wants to look at ways to create more available spaces during the cold months by possibly changing restrictions on when and where to park on snow emergency days. When a snow emergency goes into effect, Moffat said the number of spaces decreases drastically. Such changes in winter parking would be worked on during the spring and could go into effect as early as this fall.
NUCC also discussed issues that students have with landlords in off-campus apartments and houses. Students have often complained about the poor relationship they have with their landlord and how the quality of their house or apartment has not been maintained. Both Moffat and Nathan Church, SCSU vice president of student life and development, believe landlords need to be more involved and responsive to student concerns.
"Improving the quality of life in the neighborhood is a high priority of the group," Church said. "There is a real desire to get landlords more engaged."
Moffat said there is also a desire to have landlords take more responsibility for their housing and taking care of problems when they arise. One possibility discussed was the implementation of more ordinances for landlords to follow. Moffat said this might improve student-landlord relationships.
"I think it will make it easier for students to report to their landlords if they are not taking care of their property," Moffat said.
Long is not convinced that requiring landlords to follow more ordinances is the best idea since the majority of them do their job well.
"I think some of the ideas are good and there are some landlords that do not do a good job," Long said. "But I think the bad ones are in a minority and to change an entire city ordinance to go after a minority of people is not the way to address it."
Long and Church agree that NUCC is always striving to improve and maintain relationships between the community and the university. Long believes relationships between groups have been improving due to the positive people involved with NUCC.
"Several people on the committee are people that work at the university and live in the neighborhood," Long said. "Relationships are happening and they are not all going to be positive, but it is a good enough group of people that recognize (we can) work together and do some positive things. I think we are on the right track."
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