Jake,
Construction is always happening on campus, and the workers
use up valuable space for parking. Right now, the grassy area by
the Medical Plaza (on Gayley and Le Conte avenues) has been
overtaken and paved to accommodate the construction workers for the
new hospital. It looks like the parking area for the hospital is
complete, so why can’t the workers now park there and give
the community back its green space? Why isn’t there a mandate
that when erecting new structures, the parking should be built
first and utilized by the workers?
-James Schiller
As the case usually is with construction issues, follow the
money and you’ll get your answer.
According to Alvin Lee, the project director on the Ronald
Reagan Medical Center, the decision was originally made to pave and
urbanize that corner because of budget issues. California labor law
requires that construction workers be offered parking within a
certain distance from the site or else they get paid time to travel
from the parking lot to the construction site.
“If UCLA was able to provide parking within the allowable
distance, it would give the university $1.2 million back,”
Lee said.
I wish I had that kind of contract with UCLA. If my apartment is
more than some distance away from campus, I should get deadline
extensions on papers because of travel. But problem solved. Done
deal. Spend a little money to pave (although if you look through
the fence, you’ll see that they kept the trees), and save a
bunch of money in unnecessary expenses.
But fear not, lawn-lovers. When the construction project is
complete, the very people who tore up the grass and paved the land
with asphalt will tear up the asphalt and pave the land with grass.
Plans are also in the works to redesign the park space at that
point, according to Lee.
And if you think that only bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo could save
time and money by paving a park only to unpave it later, well,
you’ve been at UCLA for too long.
But as James points out, the Reagan Center’s parking lot
is complete, allowing construction workers to parking literally on
the site. So the parking lot deconstruction/park reconstruction
should be happening soon, right? Not exactly.
“The parking structure, while it’s completed, is
being used for storage,” Lee said. “Some people are
parking there, but there are 800 guys, and they can’t all
fit.”
Well, that about solves the mystery of the wasted construction
parking space. If it seems complicated, it is, which really
reflects the unintelligible complexity of the entire Reagan Center
project more than anything else.
If figuring out employee parking requires this much effort (and
affects the price by millions of dollars), I’d hate to sit in
on the meetings revolving around the installation process for
toilets.
E-mail Tracer your questions about entertainment, life, the
origins of the word “mugwump,” or anything else that
crosses your mind at jtracer@media.ucla.edu.