At some point during their time in the Purple Valley, many students will return to their car and find a dreaded parking ticket. When students appeal their tickets with Campus Safety Services (CSS) in hopes of dodging the hefty fine, their fate lies in the hands of three anonymous members of the College community.
Often, students go to great lengths to make their case to the Ticket Appeals Committee. “I’ve had typed out pages of an appeal, and it’s just their life story,” Mark Florczyk, coordinator of CSS’s safety systems who manages student parking. “It has nothing to do with the parking at all.” But who reads these pleas? How exactly does the Ticket Appeals Committee work? And why all the secrecy?
Unlike other committees at the College, such as the Honor and Discipline Committee, the Ticket Appeals Committee does not publish the names of its members, nor does it operate under the purview of any faculty or student governing bodies, according to Florczyk.
Florczyk has worked at the College for 12 years, and for as long as he can remember, the committee, rather than CSS, has decided the outcome of student ticket appeals. According to Florczyk, CSS cannot determine the outcome of appeals because, as the body responsible for issuing parking tickets, CSS cannot remain impartial in judging the merits of appeals.
The committee — which includes one staff member, one faculty member, and one student — meets monthly to review students’ appeals and decide whether to uphold or waive their parking tickets. A student’s first two parking tickets earn them a warning, and any following tickets result in at least a $50 fine. The Town’s parking fines start at $15.
During his time as the student representative on the committee, Ethan Scott ’25 has preferred to stay anonymous, noting that fewer than 10 of his friends know about his role. “[When] the people that do know you’re on parking committee get a ticket, they won’t leave you alone,” he told the Record. “For the sake of saving the student a lot of stress and headache, I do think … having it be anonymous is actually a good thing.”
Scott joined the committee in his first year at the College, after he began working for CSS as a student campus monitor. When CSS offered him the open student spot on the committee, he accepted the position. He has now served in the role for three years.
Arjun Talwar ’26 recently submitted multiple ticket appeals to the committee. “I got a very straightforward email from Mark Florczyk in which he denied all my appeals,” he said. With all his appeals rejected, Talwar currently owes $100 in fines. Last Saturday, he also received a ticket for parking in a fire lane, an offense that carries a $101 fine and cannot be counted as a warning, according to CSS’s parking rules.
Talwar does not deny that he violated the College’s parking regulations, nor the legitimacy of the regulations. “The CSS officers are doing their job, and quite well,” he said. “I think the parking rules and costs for registration are perfectly fair, but the tickets are too expensive.”
Scott emphasized that the group’s scope is limited. “The $50 is steep, but at the end of the day, we don’t set the prices,” he said. “We’re just trying to be a non-biased, open-minded committee.”
For as long as Florczyk has been at the College, the minimum parking ticket fine has been $50, and Florczyk is unaware who originally decided on this amount.
For first-time offenders, Scott said he tries to be understanding. “I feel like we are pretty accommodating, especially when it’s somebody who this is truly their first ticket,” Scott said. “As long as the appeal is honest and they seem to at least have respect for the parking rules, I think we are pretty lenient.”
Last year, after accumulating multiple tickets for parking on campus without registering her vehicle, Audrey Riddle ’26 found that CSS had placed a boot on her car.
Students have tried to get a boot off their car themselves. One student, according to Florczyk, unsuccessfully attempted to use a pair of wire cutters to free their wheel and had to pay not only the $201 boot removal fee, but also the cost of a replacement boot for CSS. Riddle, instead, elected to call CSS to remove the boot.
Riddle submitted an appeal to the committee, pleading her case. “I just owned up to it,” she said. “I apologized and told them it was on me, I should not have parked there, and that I wouldn’t make the mistake again.”
The committee partially waived her fees: they chose to dismiss the boot removal fee, and Riddle ended up paying $100 in fines from two other tickets. “I registered my vehicle, and all has been well,” she said.
Alongside Evans, Assistant Director of Alumni Events Veronica Bosley has served on the committee for three years, since Florczyk recruited her to fill the staff representative role. Bosley in turn recruited Professor of Biology Robert Savage to fill the role of faculty representative two years ago.
Florczyk allowed the Record to listen in on the committee’s most recent deliberations last Friday. After discussing the merits of each student’s appeal, the group denied four appeals and approved three.
One denied appeal came from a student who was ticketed for parking in a fire lane. “I don’t want my parents to kill me! [Frowny face] RIP,” the student wrote in their appeal, noting that they were not in the fire lane for more than ten minutes. “I take full responsibility, but I thought it was harmless at the time.”
Though the committee members say they are understanding toward first-time offenders, they rarely approve petitions for tickets given for parking in a fire lane. “Public safety issues, we aren’t really flexible on,” Bosley said.
Another appeal came from a different student who received three parking tickets for remaining in an illegal spot for three days. The group chose to approve two appeals and deny one, not wanting to issue three tickets for the same parking violation. “If we can help it, we never really want people to pay a lot of money, because that just doesn’t seem nice,” Bosley said.
Although Bosley serves on the committee, she’s not immune to parking tickets herself. She recalled that one time, while on her way to a Ticket Appeals Committee meeting, she got a ticket herself for parking on Lawrence Hall Drive, next to the Williams College Museum of Art.
Although the committee sometimes gives students the benefit of the doubt, Savage noted that offenders don’t always make it easy. “Williams students lead busy lives, and we bend over backwards to try and help them,” Savage said. “But there is a line of negligence which we see a lot of.”
Florczyk remembers a few appeals that stand out. “The craziest [appeals] for me are when a student has 15 or 16 tickets and they’re still trying to justify that they didn’t know, or that they weren’t doing it intentionally,” he said. “By then, they’re over one thousand dollars in parking fines.”
Riddle thinks that the College should provide a few spaces of temporary student parking in faculty lots to give students in need a convenient place to park. “We don’t need anything overnight, but when students are in tricky situations, which come up every now and then, we’ll have to put our car somewhere, and it would be helpful if there were one or two temporary spots per lot,” Riddle said.
Talwar said he respects CSS’s discretion and authority in issuing tickets, but plans on continuing to park outside of his assigned lot when he thinks it is reasonable. “Parking spaces were designed to have cars in them,” he said.
