Editor,
While I agree with Jocelyn Gamble’s assertion in the previous Daily Lobo that parking fees go up and take a bite out of every raise we get, her mathematics are poorly done.
As parking fees went up by 5 percent, they went up as a percentage of the fee, not her annual salary. The 6.5 percent raise was based on her salary. So, my calculations show that, if she will now pay $240 as a result of a 5 percent increase in parking fees, then she was paying $228.47, or thereabouts.
Now, if she is at the low end of the range she mentioned, at $18,000 per year, then her raise amounted to $1,170. Now assuming these to be accurate, then the $11.43 difference in parking fees does not even approach the raise she received.
Even with deductions and the increase in medical insurance, this is still the biggest raise we’ve gotten in some time. It was the intent of United Staff of UNM and the New Mexico Federation of Educational Employees to do their best to bring everyone up, exactly for the purpose of covering inflationary increases in everything from parking fees to the overall cost of living.
It was a good plan, and it worked. Isn’t your paycheck bigger now?
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US-UNM wants to eliminate parking fees altogether. Next year we can try to do that, or at least get them lowered. The way to do that is to turn our very relevant concerns into a real protest of UNM policy. If we all join our union and make it more powerful, we can work on the parking fees.
Let’s get parking into our contract next year. Maybe we shouldn’t let UNM increase parking fees without our consent.
-Terry Mulcahy
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
