Panel Shelves Bill to Fund New Courts

An Assembly committee on Monday shelved legislation that would allow Orange County to raise an additional $5 million a year to build new courthouses.

The Public Safety Committee voted 3 to 1 for the bill, one vote short of the four needed for passage on the seven-member panel. The committee agreed to let the bill’s author, Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), have the measure reconsidered Aug. 17, and she predicted she would win approval for the measure then.

“This is a minor setback,” Bergeson said Monday.

Bergeson said she would urge county supervisors and other local officials to pressure their area legislators to approve the bill, which would allow Orange and 10 other counties to double their surcharges on traffic tickets and fines collected from sentenced criminals. The county now imposes a $2 surcharge for every $10 in non-parking fines.

Two Special Funds

The bill would also allow the county to double its flat $1.50 surcharge on parking fines.

All the money collected through the extra charges would be put into two special funds for building and renovating courthouses and could be used only for that purpose.

Bergeson said the estimated $5 million the charges would generate annually in Orange County would go toward a planned expansion of the Superior Courts complex in Santa Ana and construction of a Juvenile Court building in Orange.

The criminal courts project is expected to provide 45 courtrooms, enough to meet the county’s needs through the year 2010. The Juvenile Courts building is projected to have 10 courtrooms.

Although there was no committee debate on Bergeson’s measure, the bill was opposed by several organizations, including the Automobile Club of Southern California, the California Public Defenders Assn. and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Marjorie Swartz, Sacramento lobbyist for the ACLU, said her organization opposes all such “penalty assessments.”

“It’s a backdoor tax on a small group of people,” Swartz said. “If (a project) is worth funding, it should be funded out of the general fund. This is forcing traffic offenders to pay for something that we should all be paying for.”

Bergeson, who argued that the special fee is the equivalent of a user fee charged to the people who use the courthouses, said she had expected her bill to win approval Monday. The measure was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and the full Senate without a hitch, and the Assembly Public Safety Committee approved a similar bill a year ago.

“We knew it was tight, but we thought the votes were there,” Bergeson said. She predicted that the bill would “get a lot of attention” during the Legislature’s summer recess, which begins Friday.