Camarillo Hit Hardest by State Budget Cuts--and It May Get Worse : Money: Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks also lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their financial conditions are more stable.

Three Ventura County cities will lose an estimated $1.5 million in revenue as a result of state budget cuts, with financially struggling Camarillo expected to suffer most from the loss, officials said Tuesday.

The cuts, aimed at the three so-called no- and low-property-tax cities of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, will hurt most in Camarillo, a city still recovering from $25 million lost to bad investments in 1987, Assistant City Manager Larry Davis said.

The projected $450,000 slash from a bare $8-million general fund represents a substantial loss, Davis said. The city will have to re-evaluate its plans to add staff positions, add on to City Hall and build a sheriff’s substation, he said.

“We’ve been struggling to get back on our feet, and we felt we were finally in a position to go forward with long-term plans,” Davis said. “Now, someone has pulled the rug from under our feet.”

Thousand Oaks, a city flush with a $64-million general fund, will lose about $660,000, city officials said. Simi Valley, also financially stable with a $26-million budget, will lose an estimated $440,000.

The three cities and the seven others in the county could take additional cuts if the County Board of Supervisors decides to charge the cities for booking prisoners from their jurisdictions into Ventura County Jail, as the new state budget allows.

County officials could not estimate the booking fees, but Larry Naake, executive director of the County Supervisors Assn. of California, said the fees could range from $30 to $120 per prisoner.

Estimating that prisoners from cities that do not contract for services with the Sheriff’s Department account for about 55% of the 36,000 prisoners booked annually at County Jail, the county could recoup from $495,000 to $2.7 million per year.

Provisions in this year’s budget also allow the county to charge the cities and school districts to collect and process property taxes. The county had no estimates of possible revenue from that source.

But supervisors, speaking Monday at the county’s first budget hearing, were reluctant to consider levying additional surcharges on the cities despite an estimated $5-million to $8-million state cut in county revenue.

Supervisor James R. Dougherty described the money the county could recover as “chicken feed.”

“We’re going to take tons of political heat for very little money,” he said.

County Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg warned the supervisors that enacting such fees would “make us very unpopular with all the other entities.”

The three no- and low-property-tax cities were guaranteed the additional $1.5 million this year under 1988 legislation. That law, called the Trial Court Funding Act, requires the state to assume the cost of funding the courts and relieves the counties of that burden.

In exchange, the act requires the counties to pass along a percentage of property tax money to the cities within their jurisdictions that do not collect property taxes of their own. In Ventura County, those cities are Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo.

Last year, according to the law, the county was to pass along to the three cities one cent for every dollar of property taxes collected in their jurisdictions. The cities expected to receive two cents for every dollar collected this year, three cents next year and four cents the following year. The percentage would remain constant after the fourth year.

In Ventura County, passing money through to Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo would have hurt the county more than the Trial Court Funding law helped. Special legislation was passed to guarantee Ventura County a net $5-million annual benefit, plus a 6% cost-of-living increase each year.

This year’s state budget cuts the county’s cost-of-living increase, leaves the $5-million guarantee in question and reduces the amount of money the cities will receive to 90% of last year’s allocation, County Legislative Analyst Penny Bohanon said.

Times staff writer Daryl Kelley contributed to this story.