He paid his fines with small change — now he may be in big trouble

A Wichita State University student may face a heap of trouble after paying for traffic fines with piles of loose change and crumpled-up dollar bills.

“How you definitely should not pay for a parking ticket,” Brian Hayes headlined a column about his escapade in The Sunflower, the university’s newspaper.

In the column that ran Monday, The Sunflower’s photo editor said he was fined $25 for parking in a parking garage without a permit. He thought it was open parking after 5 p.m., he wrote, but it wasn’t.

He lost the appeal and decided, “as one final act of protest against our campus’ terrible parking system,” to pay the fine in nickels. He opened his R2-D2 piggy bank, he said, and counted out 600 nickels.

He hauled a Ziploc bag — he figures it weighed about six pounds — to Jardine Hall to pay his fine, but parked illegally once again and was slapped with another parking fine.

He returned to Jardine to pay the second parking fine and buy a parking permit with 90 crumpled dollar bills, $5 in quarters and $5 in dimes. But adding his two cents about the university’s parking by using change and small bills annoyed university staff.

“An employee informed me she would file a complaint with Student Conduct for bringing wadded-up ones and change,” Hayes wrote.

He’s scheduled to meet with the assistant director for student conduct about his “protests” on Wednesday morning.

“This is the most trouble I’ve ever been in,” Hayes said in an interview Tuesday night.

The more time passes, he said, “it feels really absurd” to be called on the carpet for paying his fines in coins and small bills.

After paying thousands of dollars for his education “that I’ve worked so hard for,” he said, paying that extra money in fines “was just a little too much.

“I wasn’t going to make it easy for them.”

This story was originally published February 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM with the headline "He paid his fines with small change — now he may be in big trouble."