Parking services employees still at work

Due to zone parking on campus no longer being enforced since March 31 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, parking enforcers were reassigned to work on special projects, according to a university official.

“Office staff, we are continuing operations, which means we were still taking phone calls, responding to emails and letter correspondence,” Parking Services Director Pablo Aguilar said in an interview with The Rider Thursday. “For our parking enforcement staff, their job did change a lot. So, we were able to implement the special projects and assign them to special projects for example … looking into whether services that we could possibly offer, you know, as parking services or doing some peer comparisons, other universities benchmarking to see what they’re doing and what we’re doing and, you know, maybe get some ideas of where we’re at.”

Aguilar said there are 22 active student employees and five full-time staff working for parking services for the Edinburg and Brownsville campuses.

“We were able to begin moving students to telecommute in mid to late March,” he said. “The remaining student assistants were moved remotely on the first week of April. We’ve been telecommuting and, you know, just doing … a lot of communication through Zoom.”

UTRGV Parking and Transportation Services tweeted April 6 Vaquero Express services will be suspended until further notice.

The Rider tried to contact Rodney Gomez, executive director for UTRGV Parking and Transportation Services, via email Thursday but as of press time has not received a response.

As reported by The Rider on April 3, UTRGV offered pro-rated reimbursements to students who purchased parking permits.

UTRGV also stopped payroll deduction for employees for campus parking permits beginning the payroll check date of April 1 to Sept. 1.

“I want to say we’ve been a lot more busy, you know, trying to get all those refunds, you know, a process working a lot with auxiliary services, accounting and then, you know, student accounting as well, and just going back and forth and seeing … what process would be best the most beneficial …  for us to get those refunds out as soon as we could,” Aguilar said.

He said they are still looking at the fiscal impact from the reimbursement.

“The financial side, at this point, we’re still assessing and reassessing because, you know, there [are] some students that might have some unique circumstance that were or were not, or have not been … refunded,” Aguilar said. “Just to put it in perspective … we lost half of the permit revenue. So, that’s quite substantial when … we continue to have operations.”

For updates about UTRGV Parking and Transportation Services, visit its Twitter or Facebook page.