Parking at hospitals, should there be exemptions?
Posted Dec 3, 2011 04:49:27 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The issue of who should be paying for parking at hospitals is one that keeps being raised.
The fact is that maintenance of parking structures is expensive and someone has to pay for it. The Director of Communications at Grand River Hospital, Mark Karjaluoto tells 570News Gary Doyle Show that as of right now, volunteers are the only staff who are exempt from paying to park at hospitals.
Karjaluoto says that parking rates are in line with the municipalities.
“We’ve tried to set them up to be basically in line with what the municipalities or what the Universities would charge for them and we think it’s generally working.”
“Now obviously they are providing their services for free, so it makes some sense to make sure that they have some free parking.”
Karjaluoto adds that part of the revenue they take in from parking fees, goes into maintenance.
“We take in about $2.4 million dollars are year in parking revenue. Than we spend about $1 million of that on maintenance a year. Now, on the flip side one of the things that we are going to have to do over the next few years is spend a lot of money maintaining the garage that we have at the K-W site. That’s because it’s a concrete structure and concrete structures age and need care to last for a number of years.”
Karjaluoto says they plan on spending 2.8 million dollars over the next five years on the K-W site structure, and hope to get another 15 to 20 years out of it.
