It's 9 a.m. on a chilly January morning but Natalie Albino is warm and cozy inside an older-model Volvo station wagon.

Albino, 22, is idling her vehicle along the curb at Madison Area Technical College, waiting for one of the prized front lot parking spaces to open up at the sprawling Truax campus. "Sometimes I'll sit here for 40 minutes until somebody else leaves," the liberal arts student from Madison explains after rolling down the car window and taking out her ear buds.

Gerald Gilbert isn't so patient. He found an open parking stall in the back of the 2,739 space student lot, sprinted to make his morning class but still had time to vent about the MATC parking situation.

"In a word? It's sh----," says Gilbert, 20, a Madison East graduate hoping to earn enough credits to transfer to UW-Madison next fall. <;p> But it's not just students who are frustrated. On the same morning, MATC foundation development director Ellen Foley was running late after a lengthy parking search. "Honestly, it took me 30 minutes to park and I'm afraid I missed my meeting," she says.

For some, parking illegally has become routine, despite the risk of a $20 citation for a first offense. MATC's own traffic cops wrote 2,927 parking tickets and another 1,500 warnings last year.

Still, that level of enforcement has done little to stop drivers from blocking driveways, pulling up onto snowbanks or just leaving their vehicles parked illegally and taking a chance.

"We could sit out there all day long but we can't spend all our resources just writing parking tickets," says Jim Bottoni, chief of public safety, whose staff of four must handle calls for 13 MATC facilities across a 12-county region.

To ease the parking crunch, MATC is proposing to build a new 360-space surface parking lot on vacant land next to the school's softball stadium. College officials note the squeeze is exacerbated by the loss of 40 spaces in the existing lot due to flooding problems. The $1 million project is part of a long-range master plan completed last year.

But efforts to get the new parking lot open for the fall 2010 semester have hit a snag with the Madison Plan Commission, which earlier this month refused to issue a conditional use permit for the project and sent MATC officials back to the drawing board.

While the city planning department staff backed the plan, several commission members said MATC needs to address its larger traffic problems before paving green space for more parking. "It's already just a sea of asphalt over there," said Vilas area Ald. Julia Kerr in backing an indefinite delay of the project.

Building the new lot would require traffic signals at the corner of Anderson and Hoffman streets, something MATC would pay for it. But during the Plan Commission discussion, panel members raised concerns about students dashing across Anderson Street to get from a new parking lot to the main campus buildings. The commission also ordered the college do a transportation demand management plan - or "TDM" - to try and reduce the number of vehicles trips to the Truax campus.

An even bigger issue, noted commission member Tim Gruber, was the decision in the mid-1980s locate the MATC campus on the North Side where driving is the only option for most students or faculty.

"I almost hate to bring that up," Gruber said during the debate over conditional use permit. "That awful decision is dwarfed only by the DOT (Wisconsin Department of Transportation) decision to locate a new Madison train station out at the airport rather than downtown."

Those issues notwithstanding, the delay in the parking lot approval has outraged MATC officials, who say they are just being realistic in trying to meet growing enrollment and serve those students who drive in from outside the city. MATC saw its enrollment in degree programs increase 13 percent last year to 15,791 and expects that number to keep climbing as both older and younger students seek the skills necessary to compete in a changing economy.

"I'm hoping we don't get ‘Edgewatered' on this one," says MATC president Bettsey Barhorst, alluding to The Edgewater hotel redevelopment that remains stalled in the city approval process.

MATC officials argue they have encouraged students and faculty to use alternatives to driving. Students have voted to pay a $25 fee each semester to subsidize the Metro Transit bus passes provided free of charge. Nearly 3,400 MATC students this fall received bus passes under the program, which is designed in part to ease the parking crunch.

The land for the new parking was identified in the MATC Facilities Master Plan adopted in May 2009. The long-range plan calls for replacing a substantial amount of surface parking with buildings served by underground or ramp parking.

"Unlike UW-Madison, which provides relatively little parking due to the fact that most students access facilities without using cars, Madison College serves many commuters residing outside of the City of Madison," city planner Heather Stouder noted in a report on the project.

MATC vice president Roger Price says he is worried that if the school is having problems with the city in just getting a parking lot built, other aspects of the Master Plan could face obstacles. "We don't want a battle over every little move we make,' he says. "That scares me."

But not all MATC students are worried about the parking crunch. First-year student Abby Campbell of Madison rides her bike to campus even during the dead of winter.

"I don't drive at all, so there is no parking shortage for me," she says, clutching a black bike helmet.
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