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BERKELEY — The very public feud between Berkeley and its resident university has escalated, with the city demanding three years of back payments for a little-known parking tax.
The city wants the University of California, Berkeley to fork over 10 percent of monthly parking fees collected from students, professors and others who use about 7,000 spaces. This wouldn't raise monthly parking costs, but it could pump hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the cash-strapped city.
Berkeley already collects roughly $600,000 a year in parking taxes from the remaining 7,000 nonuniversity parking
spaces around the city, said Assistant City Manager Arrietta Chakos.
"We are trying to collect the money we are entitled to," Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said. "All we are trying to do is treat the university as we do any private entity."
Bates said the city is going after the parking tax now because it faces a $7.5 million deficit.
But university officials say the demand for fees is nothing more than Bates' "political strategy" to get the university to cooperate with city demands.
In a March 4 letter to the UC Berkeley Parking and Transportation Department, the city states: "At this point,
the university owes the city parking tax that it should have collected over the past three years, and is obligated to immediately begin collecting and remitting the tax."
Bates said if payment isn't made in a "timely manner," the city will again take legal action.
"Eventually, if we don't get satisfaction, we would go to court," Bates said Tuesday.
Under the law, the city can only collect back payments for three years, officials said.
The city soon may also ask the university to pay for sewer services.
The City Council met Monday night in closed session to discuss imposing
a fee on UC Berkeley for providing it with sewer services.
"We will charge them the same rates as everyone," Bates said, adding the city will send a letter to the university later this month.
The moves to collect parking and sewer fees come just two weeks after the city filed a lawsuit against UC Berkeley, urging the court to toss out the university's long-range plan for campus development through 2020.
The city's suit alleges the plan's environmental impact report is inadequate, a claim the university denies.
University officials say the lawsuit — and now the
demand for parking fees — is nothing more than a city effort to leverage the university into doing more environmental studies or paying more for the services it uses.
"We believe the city does not have the authority to tax the university, and this is simply part of an ongoing political strategy by the mayor," UC Berkeley spokeswoman Janet Gilmore said.
Campus attorney Michael Smith had not seen the city's parking tax letter or heard about it until a reporter alerted the university's public affairs office Tuesday.
"Under the state constitution, state agencies are immune from taxation
by local municipalities," Smith said.
But Chakos disagreed, saying "parking itself is not an activity that is directly related to the educational activities of the campus." She said the city is waiting for the university to provide the costs of parking spaces and how it intends to pay the tax.
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