Students may have noticed the appearance of new patches of asphalt in the southwestern parking lot in mid-February. These filled in potholes mark the first maintenance to the Bakersfield College parking structures for some time. They are not actually a result of funds raised via the elimination of free parking and increased parking permit costs, which was part of a plan implemented by Sean James, former BC executive director of administrative services, to raise funding to repair and upgrade those structures.
Jim Coggins, BC’s manager of maintenance and operations, said that the pothole work was done with the excess materials left over from another project on the campus.
“We had a whole truck of cold mix because we had some repairs, we had to replace a line across one of the roads, we had a truck come in to do that and I thought we’ll just get a whole truck and fill in our bad potholes,” he said.
Coggins says that right now there are no major projects planned for the parking structures by Maintenance and Operations, because they’re just trying to generate funding from the permit price increase.
“Mainly we’re trying to get our fund built up. Hopefully next year we can start attacking it and getting some of these parking lots back in shape,” he said.
Other construction on BC, mainly the Simonsen Performing Arts project, and a lack of funds has not dissuaded Coggins from trying to get at least some scheduled maintenance done on BC’s better parking lots, particularly the northeast lot, to keep it from degrading.
“Depending on timing issues because I’ve got so much other construction going on, I’m trying to get our better parking lots slurry sealed, because every five years you need to slurry them to keep them up so we don’t have all the potholes we have with the other lots. I’m hoping that maybe this semester I can get that done.” One major project for this semester is replacing the water and gas lines throughout BC, and this in conjunction with other projects will limit the amount of parking repairs students are likely to see this semester.