The College Fix

It was bad enough that he owed $110 in parking tickets at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

What was even worse, Stephen Coyle learned, was that the vast majority of the fines wouldn’t even be invested back into the university.

That’s when he decided to pay his fine entirely in pennies, ABC News reports:

“I understand why the citations were there, so that wasn’t the issue,” he said. “We have a beautiful campus, but there’s some severely neglected buildings. Lecture halls have missing seats, ceiling tiles are missing — some of that money can be reinvested into the buildings.”

Prior to paying his tickets, Coyle said he found the following information, which the university lists on the parking services section of its website.

“According to North Carolina law, the University is only allowed to retain 20% of the money collected from parking citations. The remaining 80% must be remitted to the state to support local public schools (elementary, middle and high schools). The 20% that UNC Charlotte is allowed to keep is earmarked to cover operating costs for parking enforcement,” according to the website.

He carried in three buckets of pennies to the parking office and won a battle with a supervisor over having to count the pennies himself “in front of her.” It took office employees nearly four hours to count the pennies:

“I apologized immediately when I gave them the change, saying it was a part of the protest I was doing,” Coyle said. “They were fine with it. The only person that seemed pretty upset was their manager.”

The school issued this statement, full of thinly veiled hostility:

Regarding the student who paid his traffic fines in pennies, our understanding is that he paid in pennies to symbolize his dissatisfaction with a North Carolina constitutional mandate. That mandate requires that most of the money from such fines be remitted to the Office of State Budget Management to support public schools, rather than used on campus. The University appreciates the student’s interest and initiative in learning more about the functioning of government.

Coyle is now using the notoriety of his stunt to do a fundraiser for another program he claims is underfunded:

I plan on using the donations to purchase a set of actuarial study manuals for the UNCC Actuarial Science program as I know they desperately need more resources. It is not an understatement to say that these manuals are invaluable to students who want to pass their certification exams and they are very expensive.

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