Buying an expired parking permit from Housing and Food Services nearly cost a UW student $60 in tickets.

On Oct. 10, in the Terry-Lander parking garage, junior Fereshta Noman discovered three tickets totaling $90 on her car’s windshield. The violations read: No valid permit displayed.

Yet Noman did have a parking permit displayed; what she didn’t realize was that she’d purchased an expired permit from the Housing and Food Services Terry Hall desk.

Because Noman assumed that she was sold a valid parking permit, it didn’t occur to her to check the dates.

Upon her discovery, Noman went straight to Parking Services to complain.

The HFS Terry Hall desk confirmed that an employee of theirs had accidently sold Noman an expired permit and as a result, Noman’s first $30 ticket would be waived.

But since Noman was ticketed over a period of days, Noman was told that she was still responsible for paying the $60 for the remaining two tickets. HFS claimed that Noman should’ve reported her expired permit sooner.

However, because Noman rarely uses her vehicle, other than to drive to her parents’ home on weekends, it wasn’t until Oct. 10 that she realized she’d been ticketed on the dates of Oct. 6, 8 and 9.

“It’s unfair. Why should I have to pay when it wasn’t my fault?” Noman said.

Struggling to pay tuition and unable to afford the $60 in tickets, Noman continued contacting the HFS Terry Hall desk, calling once and e-mailing during three other occasions.

Yet it wasn’t until Noman’s second phone call, when her irate mother complained that it was unfair for her daughter to pay for a mistake made by HFS, that all three of Noman’s tickets were dismissed.

Joshua Kavanagh, director of UW Transportation Services, acknowledged that a clerical error had been made at the Housing and Food Services Terry Hall desk.

Expired permits are “virtually never” sold, Kavanagh said.

In his one and a half years as director of Transportation Services, Noman’s case was the only one Kavanagh had heard of.

When asked to comment about how Noman’s case had been handled, Kavanagh stated that there had been confusion about the circumstances surrounding Noman’s expired permit. However, when dealing with cases in which multiple citations are received as a result of a single permit error, the procedure is to dismiss all the citations, Kavanagh said.

Though Transportation Services supplies HFS with parking permits, the two departments are under different management, Kavanagh said.

“Transportation Services will be investigating [HFS’] operating procedures to understand what happened,” Kavanagh said.

Kavanagh admitted that it would have made sense to separate the expired permits from the new permits to avoid confusion.

In the future, HFS and Transportation Services will become more integrated, Kavanagh said, “so that clerical errors won’t happen again.”

Reach reporter Sue Yang at news@dailyuw.com.