“Sold out.”
That’s not what Bakersfield College students expected to see when logging on to purchase parking permits for fall semester the weekend before it started, but that’s what the Web site read.
But that was just a “hiccup,” according to Sgt. Chris Counts and the first time something like this has ever happened.
Student Luis Ortiz said, “Like, it kept saying they had permits available, but when I went on the website, it kept saying sold out, sold out.”
Several students complained on the first day of school Aug. 22 that they couldn’t purchase parking permits over the weekend.
Bakersfield College uses ThePermitStore.com to distribute its parking permits.
Upon calling iParq, the company that runs ThePermitStore.com, the woman who answered the phone was not forthcoming in explaining why the website had run out of permits so close to the start of the semester.
Come to find out, no one was at fault, it was just a great surge of permit purchasing in the week before school started.
“Not a whole bunch of people had purchased permits during the weeks before that led up to school, and so there must have been a huge run between like Thursday and Sunday and it just depleted the availability,” said Counts.
“So I came in Sunday morning, or Monday morning (the first day of school), and we rectified the situation by 7:45 in the morning.”
When asked how many permits were available, Counts said “As many as want to be bought.”
The Web site no longer reads as being sold out and has plenty of permits to go around.
Meanwhile, some parking has been lost on Panorama Drive on the north end of campus because of construction on the new Golden Empire Transit bus terminal.
Construction is currently under way to move the GET bus stop at BC, which currently stops near the Fine Arts Building on the northeast side of the campus across from the solar-panel parking lot.
There will also be a restroom facility as part of this new bus station.
BC officials have stated that the new stop will remove foot traffic from the congested area of the northeast parking lot.
Currently, there is fencing around the project that will be removed once the project is completed, which is expected to be by the end of this calendar year.