Is The Sun Bowl Parking Garage Reserved For Donors Only This Football Season? Yes And We Know Why!

UTEP kicked off it's football season this past weekend with a loss to the UNM Lobos, and while that was a sad start to the Coach Kugler era, the Miners loss wasn't the biggest tragedy of the night.  It was the ridiculous parking situation!

For the past two weeks, there have been press releases and news stories about the parking on and off campus for the upcoming football season.  There is a lot of construction going on all over campus, so that is going to, understandably, make parking for events a little tight.  But when fans got to the Sun Bowl parking garage on Saturday, they were told that donors were getting preferential treatment.

Mike and his wife were told that there were only a limited number of public parking spaces in the Sun Bowl parking garage and because those had been taken, the remainder of the spaces were being saved for donors.  When Darren and I drove up to the entrance around 5:15 p.m., we were told that there was no public parking at all this season in the Sun Bowl garage.

So what is the truth?

I spoke this morning with Jorge Vasquez, the head of Special Events at UTEP, and he said only season ticket holders, aka donors, would be allowed to park at the Sun Bowl parking garage this football season, even if that means an empty parking garage because people don't show up for the game.

Ok, that's all well and good, but the day before the game, there was no mention made of that in this story on the parking situation at the Sun Bowl parking garage.  There was no signage in front of the garage on game day, and a person in a parking garage uniform said there was parking available when we asked as we waited in line.  No mention of 'donors only'.

Rethinking this whole 'lets go to the Miners game tonight' thing........

Do you want to tell UTEP how you feel about not being able to park at the Sun Bowl parking garage?  Contact the Office of Special Events - they are the ones who made that decision.