Ohlone College to add signs clarifying parking fee hours
Ohlone College will add more signs to both of its campuses and reprogram parking permit machines to better inform visitors and students when they need to buy a parking permit.
Those steps are coming in the wake of a September report by this newspaper that showed the Fremont campus inadvertently collected more than $9,000 in parking fees over the past three years on Sundays, when parking is supposed to be free.
Susan Yeager, the college’s vice president of administrative services, said staff is working on the design of new signs that will be “posted adjacent to all parking permit machines” in the school’s multi-level parking structure and lower parking lots at its Fremont campus, as well as in lots at the Newark campus.
The new signs will list the hours when parking permits are required, similar to those near the entrance to the parking structure in Fremont. Signs near the parking lots in the lower portions of the school tell visitors parking permits are needed there but don’t specify the hours. The machines in the various lots do not display the hours of parking enforcement either.
There are also large signs on the two entrance roads to the Fremont campus, Witherly Lane and Pine Street, that read “No free parking on campus,” without elaboration.
Yeager said temporary signs detailing the free hours will go up next to permit machines by Nov. 1 if new permanent signs are not ready by then. The Fremont campus’ parking permit fee collection hours also will be expanded on that date.
The college’s two campuses currently charge students and guests for parking during weekdays from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m. and Saturdays from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., after which time it’s free until 11 p.m. Parking is also free on Sundays. The campus is closed for parking between 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day.
Starting on Nov. 1 at the Fremont campus, parking permits will be required every day, including weekends, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. The Newark campus hours will not change.
Until then, Yeager said the digital display on permit-dispensing machines on both campuses will now read “Free Parking” after 5 p.m. on Saturday and all day Sunday, to let those parking there know they don’t need to fork over any money during those hours.
In a July memo, Ohlone President Gary Browning indicated that the East Bay Regional Park District and city of Fremont have in recent months encouraged hikers and others visiting Mission Peak Regional Preserve to park in Ohlone’s parking structure to access a nearby trailhead, instead of parking on residential streets farther south.
The influx of more people parking there on weekends “necessitated the need for more clean up in the parking garage area and increased security,” the memo states, adding that the increase in visitors during the spring hiking season also more than doubled parking revenue from spring 2016.
However, the school’s parking fund, which pays for enforcement and upkeep of parking areas, has been running a significant deficit for the last three years and is still in the red by more than $200,000, according to data provided by Ohlone.
As for the thousands of dollars collected on free Sundays in fiscal years 201415 through 2016-17, the college is keeping it.
Yeager said in a prior email “the college will not be trying to pay people back who paid for parking permits when permits were not required” because the school believes there was “adequate signage saying no fees are due on a Sunday.”
She added the school would not be sure “how or to whom we would repay fees” because its parking vendor only keeps debit and credit card information for 30 days. Some people also paid for the permits with cash, which would not be possible to track, according to the school’s police chief, John Worley.