Senate OKs Measure to Raise Jail Funds : Bill Would Allow S.D. County to Double Surcharge on Traffic Tickets

In a move San Diego County officials say could help them ease chronic jail overcrowding, the Senate on Thursday approved legislation allowing the county to raise an additional $3 million a year for courthouse and jail construction.

The bill, by Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), was approved, 35-0, without debate and sent to the Assembly.

Bergeson’s measure would allow San Diego and 10 other counties to double their surcharges on traffic tickets and on fines collected from sentenced criminals.

Currently, San Diego imposes a $2 surcharge for every $10 in non-parking fines, and a flat $3 on parking fines. Half the money collected goes into a fund for courthouse construction, the other half for building jails.

Doubling of Fines

Under Bergeson’s bill, the surcharges on non-parking fines would double, giving the county an additional $1.5 million a year for each fund. The $3 surcharge on parking tickets would remain unchanged.

Nick Marinovich, an analyst with the county’s office of special projects, said the county hopes to use the increased fines to expand courthouse space throughout the county and to help build a $50-million jail that would hold defendants before they are brought to trial.

The jail fund, which with Bergeson’s bill would climb to about $4.2 million a year, would be used to pay off bonds the county hopes to sell to finance the new jail. The county is hoping to build the jail on an unused piece of Air Force property on Midway Drive.

The proposed jail is part of the county’s master plan for expanding its criminal justice system. The county now has a central jail downtown; regional jails in Vista, Chula Vista and El Cajon; a jail camp in Descanso, and a women’s jail in Santee.

Limit on Inmates

All of the jails are chronically overcrowded, and the downtown jail is under court order to limit its population to 750 inmates. In an attempt to meet that order, Sheriff John Duffy decided April 10 that the downtown jail would no longer accept misdemeanor suspects and instead ordered that all such prisoners be released on a promise to appear in court or be booked at the regional jail in Vista.

Though the Bergeson bill came under some criticism before winning approval in a Senate committee March 24, the full Senate approved the measure Thursday without a word of debate.

Bergeson said the surcharges should be viewed as “user fees” forcing those who use the courthouses and jails to pay for their construction.

“Everyone wishes they had other funding sources to draw from, but there isn’t anything else available at this time,” Bergeson said.

Bergeson’s measure is almost identical to one approved by the Senate last year but killed in the Assembly in a move by former Assemblyman Richard Robinson, an Orange County Democrat who gave up his seat in the Legislature to make an unsuccessful bid for Congress last November.

In opposing the bill last year, Robinson called it a stop-gap measure that would undermine the chances for meaningful reform of the state’s system of paying for the operation of trial courts. Bergeson said she expects this year’s bill to have an easier time in the Assembly now that Robinson is gone.