As you pull up to your parking lot, you see it. In spot number seven, a new expensive coupe sits where your slightly older, but beloved vehicle should be, in your more-than-high-priced-a-month parking spot.

Should you find another temporary parking spot or be the jerk that slaps someone with a hefty towing bill? Hamlet had it all wrong in his famous and often-quoted soliloquy, to tow or not to tow is truly the question.

Most student residences in the Champaign-Urbana area offer some sort of parking for their residents. While apartments, University residence halls, sororities and fraternities all offer parking spots, students are sometimes unaware of the best course of action to take when faced with an unauthorized vehicle in their assigned spot.

Dave Barr, chairman of Barr Real Estate, Inc., an agency that offers their tenants parking spaces, said the decision to tow is a “tough call and not a fun situation.”

Barr said most parking spots on campus are assigned and most people on campus know the spots are assigned.

“I tell our tenants, nobody likes to do it, but if you can’t find the person and have them move their car and you can’t find a spot in the street, tow them, because if not, you’re going to get towed,” Barr said.

The city of Champaign allows anybody to lease assigned spaces from the city to have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, according to Shirl Johnson, parking operations supervisor for the city of Champaign.

“That’s what their lease says, if somebody is in their space, they are to call the answering service to request a tow truck,” Johnson said.

Johnson said there are also unassigned spaces that can be leased in downtown Champaign that are not towable areas.

Susan Jepsen, chief financial officer for Reynolds Towing in Urbana, said the company relocates a large amount of cars at private parking spots on campus, and the entire process is a “very costly” one.

The initial fee for a relocation tow is $115, plus $25 for either city (Champaign or Urbana) in which the vehicle is towed, $35 a day for storage at Reynolds lot, plus an additional $45 if the car has to be dollied in order to transport it — all of which are the responsibility of the towed car’s owner, according to Jepsen.

When the owner comes to claim the vehicle, Reynolds makes a copy of the owner’s driver license, as many of the parking spot lessees see some sort of retaliation after having the unauthorized car towed, and the license can be used by the police later in connection with the retaliation.

Jepsen added that while most private parking spots have towing signs for relocation that are for one specific company, any University campus parking spaces are towed by companies on rotation with varying fees and policies.

Barr said that in every one of the Barr apartment parking spots, there are signs posted that advise people to not park in assigned spots and that towing will occur.

He added that he had seen a towing sign in almost every lot on campus.

Whether it’s just for a hour or a minute, don’t take the chance of finding yourself in an expensive and time consuming situation, and remember this amended advice from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, above all: To thine own parking spot be true.