Mid South Transportation & Parking Association / Q & A with Mike Tudor
President of Mid South Transportation & Parking Association (MSTPA)
The Mid South Transportation & Parking Association (MSTPA), led by President Mike Tudor, CAPP and a dynamic board of directors, will be hosting an annual conference March 15-16 in Birmingham, Alabama. Cindy Campbell, senior training and development specialist for IPMI, recently sat down with Mike to discuss their conference and ongoing success of MSTPA.
Cindy Campbell: With MSTPA having hosted a successful conference in September, what was the thought process behind this conference in March?
Mike Tudor: The March conference this year is designed as a smaller, more focused 1 ½ day conference. While we typically hold our large conference in March, we had to postpone last year’s conference to September due to COVID. As a board, we recognize that hosting another large event only six months later could be challenging to many organizations that have had to tighten their budgets for these types of training opportunities. Therefore, we decided to make it a shorter conference structured with offerings that are very unique. We are excited about what we have to offer.
What has you the most excited about it?
To begin with, the conference will be held in Birmingham, Alabama. We have never had a conference in Birmingham since I have been on the board, so we are excited to be able to take our attendees to this area. There is a lot of growth that is taking place in Birmingham right now. We are thrilled to go there and work with the local community to be able to see what they have done for parking and development in that area.
What are some of the things that the conference is offering in support of that growth in the parking industry?
We are offering a couple different ways to feed the parking community with relevant knowledge from the industry. We will be presenting Frontline training with you, Cindy, and we know that will be extremely valuable to those in the area. Other soft-skills sessions include the return to work after COVID and emotional intelligence. There are technical sessions on technology implementation, curbside management, and EV charging. We are also going to take our members out for two different tours.
Yes, I am excited about what I have heard about these tours! They are not the standard observational tours we have come to expect, correct? What are the goals of the tours, and what can the attendees expect to take away from them?
During COVID, budgets have been tight. Getting the funds to perform capital improvements on facilities is difficult. To help our attendees with this challenge, we will be looking at a local parking facility, the Boutwell Auditorium Parking Deck, and reviewing it from several angles of operations and maintenance. We will then come back and do a charette, breaking up into groups and talking about long term maintenance, event operations, and the customer experience. We think this will be valuable for both our local attendees and for the other members who can take what they learn back home. The goal is that through this charette, attendees will identify how to make a five-year or a 10-year maintenance plan to attack the needs of their facility, incorporate modern technology into event operations, and maintain a high level of customer service and experience.
That same evening, we will be offering a tour of the Civic Center in Birmingham, which is the main events center for the area. They have recently completed a lot of renovation work to this site. Then, the next morning we are planning an additional session focused on event parking. This will be a great opportunity for attendees to learn best practices for managing event parking in their facilities.
These sound like such great take-aways! From maintenance, to operations, to handling events—what awesome things to have our members experience. And from such a hands-on perspective!
That is what we were shooting for. Especially for so many of the front-line folks—this training will be very valuable. And for the mid-level managers who are tasked with accomplishing so many of the day-to-day operations and maintenance tasks, we are looking forward to being a great resource. Our vision was to provide valuable, hands-on knowledge that they can take back and use. Training is great, but if you cannot take it back and use it, you lose it. We want them to leave with actionable takeaways that they can use right now.
Where did these creative ideas for your sessions come from?
From our board. We had a strategic planning session during COVID, and we decided that while our annual conference was great, we had more to offer. We felt that the conference alone just didn’t feed the membership enough, and we wanted to better engage our members throughout the whole year. We began doing monthly blogs, a newsletter, and we have begun offering webinars to our members as well. We also decided on a mid-year conference session, and when the topic of Birmingham came up, we knew there were many opportunities to explore, not just our standard parking topics, but to also focus on the maintenance/operations and events topics.
Well, this sounds like a really cool event. And just like MSTPA as a whole, I get a really welcoming, inviting, familial air about the conference. So much of the success of these conferences is about the people involved, and clearly your board has worked hard to pull all of this together. As we round out our conversation, what would you say is the crown jewel of your current board activities?
This board is the most active one I have been on in my years at MSTPA. We are all volunteers, we all have our full-time jobs, but this group is very engaged. We get together monthly to talk about ideas and work through the events. MSTPA members can see that engagement come through in the quality and value of what we are offering. We pride ourselves on great southern hospitality, and these events are opportunities for us to come together like family. Because really, that’s what the parking community is, one big family. And I am excited for the chance to see everyone again in Birmingham.
For more information on the MSTPA Annual Conference, March 15-16 in Birmingham, Alabama, visit mstpa.org.
