Park a Gas Guzzler in an Electric Car Spot, Get a $100 Ticket

You’re late for a big meeting at the Marin Civic Center in San Rafael and the only parking spot you can find is designated as an electric car-charging station. No one will notice, right?

You better hope not. The Marin County Board of Supervisors this week established fines for illegal parking in the county’s three electric car-charging stations: one apiece at the Civic Center, the Marin Health and Wellness Center and the Marin Center Exhibit Hall.

The supervisors approved a $100 fine for non-electric cars that park in one of the electric car-charging stations, as well as a $27 fine for any car parking in one of the stations for more than the four-hour limit.

The county set the fines based on those of the city of San Rafael for the same violations, treating the non-electric parking in a station as the same as a non-handicapped vehicle parked in a space reserved for handicapped parking, according to senior civil engineer Bob Goralka.

The electric car-charging stations were installed in November 2011.  

In April, the to a new electric car-charging station at Hauke Park near the , which will power the station and gets most of its power from the large solar array behind it.

The city won’t charge for residents to use the station but plan to monitor its use to determine if a fee should be applied in the future, city officials said. The parking spot, which will be limited to four hours at a time, won’t be restricted to electric vehicle parking.

According to a estimate from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, 104,262 of the more than 22 million registered vehicles in California are electric. When extrapolated against the 186,593 registered electric cars in Marin County in 2010, there were less than 1,000 electric cars in Marin County in 2010.