By: Bob Browand

As an auxiliary service to UH, Parking and Transportation Services receives no funding from the government, student tuition or fees. Our operations and services are run solely off of the revenue we generate from permit sales, parking enforcement, and event/visitor parking.  

I know some of you may think parking rates are too high and that PTS has “boat loads” of money, but in actuality, our department only receives enough money to cover our operating costs and perform minimal repairs and improvements to parking lots and streets.   

Here's a quick snapshot of how our budget is currently broken down:

Read on to learn more about each piece of the pie.

54% of our budget goes to debt service, which is just a fancy way for us to refer to the money we still owe on the revenue bonds we took out to construct all of the parking garages on campus.

Our revenue bonds mature in 20 years and the graph below breaks down the payment timeline for each specific garage structure.

17% of all PTS dollars go toward the Cougar Line Shuttle Service. 

Year-to-date, our shuttles have transported 225,807 passengers and have run for a total of 29,789 hours each fiscal year.

14% of our budget goes to the necessary day-to-day equipment, office and operating expenditures that are in place to ensure we can continually deliver our services to the campus community 

12% of your parking dollars go toward paying the people who serve our customers and keep the department going. 

This includes:

• administrative and financial personnel

• customer service representatives

• maintenance and operations team members

• parking enforcement officers 

3% of all parking dollars are reinvested into larger-scale maintenance projects such as concrete repair, parking lot striping and asphalt work.  

published: Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016