By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Parking Services at Bowling Green State University wants to replace some of the annoyance of getting a parking ticket with some holiday cheer.
Parking services has launched its inaugural Toys for Tickets campaign. People who get most types of parking tickets on campus can pay up with a new toy of similar value as a ticket. Participants need to provide a receipt with the toy. Those toys, said Aaron Kane, manager of parking services, will be donated to Wood County Children’s Protective Services and Wood County Children’s Resource Center.
Some serious offenses, he said, are exempt from the tradeoff. You can’t trade toys for the $250 tickets for having a forged permit or for parking in a handicapped space.
The Toys for Tickets applies to tickets written between Oct. 1 and Dec. 9. People don’t have to get a parking ticket to participate.
Kane said he’s always looking at how other agencies conduct their operations and saw one city that did something similar as a food drive. (The Wood County Public Library has a food for fines program during the holidays.) The toy drive was inspired by the University of Cincinnati.
Kane credited Ashley Allen from his office and Amber Stark from Marketing and Communications for coordinating the effort.
Within a few days, Kane said, gifts started accumulating under the tree in the Parking Services office in the College Park Office Building. In the first days of the drive more than 30 toys had been donated.
He said his office issues about $30,000 in tickets in the time frame covered by the drive. That includes, he said, those tickets not eligible for the promotion. Still, “there’s potential there.”
The drive, Kane said, is part of a top-down encouragement of efforts that benefit the community. “That’s what we strive for,” Kane said, “positive community relationships.”
