When UGA needed someone to oversee parking services, they decided to find someone with similar job experience, so they called Mark Craig. He used to work at the Pentagon and eight years as a county manager, so the vitriol that surrounds UGA parking is up his alley. “When I wasn’t serving on tanks, I was managing money,” he said.
Now, he has a chance to combine both of those occupations. Craig has managed the 17,500 parking spaces on campus and the logistics that go along with assigning spaces to the masses since November.
He takes the job seriously. While parking is usually only spoken of when it’s not available, his department has a big role in the minds of visitors to campus, Craig said.
“We make the first impression and the last impression,” he said. “So it needs to be a good one.”
He prefers that side of it—the logistics of making a limited resource work for everyone—better than the handling tickets. Last year, his office issued about 35,000 citations.
“If we didn’t have to write a single ticket, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings. But when we allow someone to abuse the system, what we’re basically doing is denying the opportunity for someone abiding by the rules to legitimately park closer to where they want to park, and increasing everyone’s permit costs since we can’t sell the space they occupy,” he said.
And the bad publicity that 35,000 tickets generate? After all, he said, enforcement is an essential part of the system. Without any system, finding a space to park would be maddening.
“We’re working to reach out to all areas of the campus that we deal with so that I can understand the needs of people across the university. We might not be able to give everyone exactly what they want, but we can come out with something that is at least a workable solution,” he said.
“When you’re allocating and optimizing scarce resources it’s real tough and it’s just going to get tougher.”
That attitude comes from experience. Craig graduated from UGA in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in agronomy. He understands the university, and he understands Athens. He was born here and raised on a small family farm in Lawrenceville.
After graduation, Craig spent 20 years in the U.S. Army, working in operational fields and budgeting. After receiving an M.B.A. in comptrollership from Syracuse University, he crunched numbers at the Pentagon and was professor of military science at Claremont McKenna College.
Now he’s back in the Athens area with his wife, Marcia. They have two daughters, Sarah, 24, and Erin, 21.
In his spare time, Craig reads histories and biographies, and likes Georgia sports and Braves baseball.
