I feel like I can speak for everyone when I say that I was beyond excited to start this school year. I was looking forward to seeing smiling faces, walking up any stairwell I pleased, and having a normal year. Just when I was fully excited, however, a shadow was cast over the semester. When it eventually came time to buy my parking pass, I had prepared my bank account for the $175 fee and had braced myself emotionally for having to make a purchase that large. When it came time to finally checkout, my shock and horror was unmatched when I discovered parking passes were an outrageous $205. What is up with that? After a year of financial hardships and struggle, raising the price of parking passes seems like an unnecessary blow to the student body. We have all felt the sting of the college’s budget cuts over the last year, and the raise in parking pass prices is truly adding salt to the wound. Not every student can pay the $205 fee and considering many of us have been forced to work less over the past two summers due to COVID, $205 is a hard hit. A fee this high would be palatable to me if the school guaranteed parking. If I were buying a designated spot for the year, then yes, I would understand charging more for the parking pass, with a little less grumbling. However, since parking is not guaranteed, and more often than not you have to park in Sullivan anyway, there is no reason to be charging more than $150 or $175 for a pass. If 1,000 students bought a parking pass this year, that is a hefty $205,000 in passes alone! This doesn’t even include the $60 parking tickets that are issued for parking in the wrong spot!! All in all, the parking situation at Saint A’s has always been lackluster and a little frustrating. At the very least, it’s become a constant that makes me feel like it’s one of the many quirks that make this charming place home. That being said, I think we are overselling ourselves by making parking here that expensive. Unless we revamp the way we handle parking by selling guaranteed spots instead of general passes, or some other alternative that I simply haven’t thought of yet, the price of the pass needs to be lowered.