If Chancellor Henry Yang listens to his advisory committee, undergraduate students will have to pay for weekend and nighttime parking starting July 1 in order to generate funding for the expansion of on-campus parking facilities.

The Chancellor’s Special Advisory Committee on Parking recommended that UCSB begin charging for nights and weekends with initial rates of $10 per month or $2 per night/weekend day. The committee also recommended that the daytime parking rate be increased from $5 to $7. The monthly permit rate of $35 would remain the same.

The additional funding will enable Parking Services to build a $26 million, 825-space parking structure on Lot 10 pending budget allocations, Advisory Committee Chairman Gene Lucas said.

“It’s our philosophy that all users, whether they use it during the day or night, should be obligated to pay for parking,” he said. “It’s just like when you go downtown in the evening, you expect to pay a few dollars for parking. It’s on this basis we’re making these recommendations.”

Associated Students President Brian Hampton said safety issues arise from night parking because students may opt to walk or ride their bikes instead of paying the fee.

“If the option to drive to campus comes at a cost then a lot of people just won’t use the campus and if they do … that creates dangers of dark spots and women walking alone,” he said.

The university may lose over 1,500 parking spaces in the next 10 years due construction, and an increase and expansion of short-term rates will keep the costs of long-term permits down, Lucas said.

“Providing reasonably priced and accessible parking for employees and commuting students should be considered a priority,” he said “It should be recognized by the administration as a primary issue, as well as in the best interests of the campus as a whole.”

Increased daily fees are more likely to be a burden for undergraduate students, advisory committee member and Graduate Student Association President Shawn Landres said.

“For the faculty and the staff, they already have permits for parking,” he said. “With such a small amount of undergraduate students with [long-term] permits, they are going to be the ones most impacted.”

Graduate students would be exempt from the fee because GSA voted last week to pay a set lock-in fee of a $3.33 per student per quarter for the next four years, which all graduate students will have to pay regardless of whether or not they use parking facilities. Landres said the lock-in fee will save graduate students money in the long run.

“As grad students, we do a lot of our work at night,” he said. “And with that comes major security issues, with students biking to school and then choosing to drive home at night, so the added night fee would really have been costly for graduate students.”

Undergraduates could not consider a similar lock-in fee on the 2002 ballot because of a moratorium A.S. passed in February on all new A.S. lock-in fees.

Landres and Lucas expect the chancellor’s advisory committee to present its recommendations to the students during the next few weeks at A.S. meetings, GSA meetings and two public forums on campus.

Many undergraduates are displeased with the proposal.

“Obviously I’m not too happy about it,” junior political science major Star Bucay said. “It just seems like too much money for students to be paying. We come to campus to study and if I want to go to the library at night it’s not fair that I should have to pay that much.”