Must we pay for UC Irvine’s lot in life?

Universities are about learning, and, if nothing else, UC Irvine has taught Janet Kinosian a lesson: When you’re supposed to pay to park, you better pay to park.

Kinosian is a professional writer and a grown woman and would be the first to tell you she learned how to feed meters long ago. It’s just that, well, sometimes a person doesn’t have any quarters on them. And, as in Kinosian’s case, sometimes you just feel lucky.

Kinosian had that feeling one night in February when she went to work out in the Anteater Recreation Center on campus. She could have planned ahead or scoured the environs for the 50 cents needed for a one-hour parking permit but instead decided, oh, what the heck.

I would chastise her on moral grounds, except she apparently is a woman after my own heart. I detest paying for parking, not on grounds of cheapness but on grounds that what else should that empty space be used for but to rest a person’s car?

And why should there be a cost attached to it?

It’s not like you’re paying for a service. You’re not buying anything. You’re simply storing your transportation, like you would a horse to the hitching post in the Old West. If your car weren’t taking the spot, it’d be someone else’s.

Yes, the parking lot could be converted to something else that generated revenue. I understand that, but until it is, I don’t see why the uninhabited land should gobble up money from people who, obviously, have to put their cars somewhere.

You’ll notice that malls understand the concept that cars have to go somewhere. So do many hospitals. Even our newspaper gets it -- in Orange County, The Times sometimes turns over our parking lot to community groups. We don’t charge people to leave their cars outside the meeting room.

Kinosian is unhappy because her misplaced sense of luck resulted in her getting a $52 ticket. To her, that was a pretty outrageous sum for a two-bit infraction (make that four bits).

I must agree. It smacks of penalizing a football team 30 yards for being offsides.

Call me a dangerous thinker, but my idea of parking infractions are when, for example, you park illicitly in a handicapped space or block a fire lane or some other situation when your deed threatens safety or violates common courtesy.

Kinosian isn’t even protesting her ticket. She simply wants to know why a public university can hit a taxpayer for $52 over a 50-cent gambit. And where the money goes. She protested her ticket to a hearing officer this month, but to no avail. Her final option, which she doesn’t plan to exercise, is to go to Municipal Court.

I put the questions to UCI spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon, who probably had better things to research but was a pro about it, nonetheless. Maybe that’s because she has nothing to do with setting the fines.

She referred me to a set of guidelines that, I promise, I’ll read someday.

UCI parking office personnel establish the fee structure, Lawhon says, with oversight from the executive vice chancellor and UC officials in Oakland “to make sure all the campuses are in line.”

It is not required that all campuses levy identical fines. Lawhon says, for example, that UCI was advised in one review to increase its fines for counterfeit permits from $150 to $300. That still didn’t make it the priciest in the UC system.

So, who profits from scofflaws like Kinosian, who made a conscious decision to deprive the university of 50 cents? Where do the fines go?

Keggers? Faculty masquerade balls in the Bren Center?

Lawhon says fines from UCI’s parking lots have generated between $800,000 and $1.1 million annually in recent years.

The money helps finance the university’s “alternative transportation projects,” such as its shuttles, vanpools, walk-or-bike-to-work incentives and a partnership with the Orange County Transportation Authority that provides free bus rides for faculty and staff.

The fines generally account for about half the revenue needed for those programs, Lawhon says.

What have we learned today?

Are we so accustomed to seeing big numbers floating around that $1 million in a year from UCI parking fines doesn’t bother us? Isn’t that a lot of money? Should a university be pocketing that kind of money from us, some of it from 50-cent violations?

I’m pretty sure I speak for Kinosian, at least, when I say it’s clearly excessive.

Then again, I favor five yards for offsides.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns: www.latimes.com/parsons