Photo illustration by Michael Uribes

The University Police Department at Fresno State is facing a possible lawsuit from Fresno County for unpaid fees owed to them.

Fresno State Chief of Police David Huerta said the department’s legal issues with Fresno County are still unsettled and have been for years.

“There’s a law that says that universities are obligated to pay the county for county construction costs,” Huerta said. “We hadn’t been paying that for a number of years because of some legal opinions, and we were finally advised we needed to do that. So we’re currently working out negotiations with Fresno County to resolve that matter.”

Huerta said ten dollars of every parking citation issued at Fresno State is required to go to Fresno County. Some time before Huerta began working for the university, someone decided to stop paying the fee, and as a result the university is now being asked to make up for the missed payments which Huerta said could potentially be an excessively large sum.

“We never raised our ticket prices to accommodate that ten dollars,” Huerta said. “Here we are today with a fund balance that is just enough to operate and do some things with.”

Huerta said the department and Fresno County are at the tail end of coming to some type of understanding regarding the situation to help prevent a lawsuit.

“We could get out of this much cheaper by reaching a mutual agreement,” Huerta said. “We’re going to have to go back a few years and have to catch up on the money that is owed to the county.”

Regardless of the financial issues the department is dealing with, Huerta said they remain focused on correcting the situation and moving forward.

“We’re going to have to settle this amount,” Huerta said. “Then we’re going to have to recover from it.”

The department didn’t give an estimated date of when the issue would be resolved.

In addition, requests directed to the police department regarding how parking citation money is actually being used have also not been met.

According to California Education Code, Section 89701.5, money from parking citations is strictly required to go to alternative transportation. When the traffic operations department at Fresno State was asked to provide statistics that validate how the money is being used, The Collegian was told it would receive the statistics via email within one day. Two weeks and multiple attempts later, the documents have still not been received.

The Collegian was told by a traffic operations employee that the requested numbers had been passed along to Fresno State Chief of Police David Huerta.

When Huerta was asked for the documentation and statistics, he had nothing to give and said his department is not responsible for providing that information.

However, The Collegian had previously contacted Fresno State’s accounting services, which said the traffic operations department deals with that information and they should be able to provide the requested documents.