Judge Rules County Can Keep Fines

The 10 cities of Ventura County lost their bid Thursday for a portion of the estimated $1 million in drunk-driving fines collected each year by the Municipal Court.

Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Ron Stevens filed a tentative ruling against the cities, which had sued the county to regain certain drunk-driving fines.

The cities lost the fines in 1987 when the Ventura Municipal Court decided that most convicted drunk drivers eligible for probation should be sentenced to a stricter form of probation, thus allowing the county to keep all of the fines.

Officials in the larger cities said Thursday that losing the suit means losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that they could have spent on anti-drunk-driving programs.

“We’re obviously disappointed,” said Bill Mayer, Oxnard management and budget director. “We’ve lost $600,000 a year.”

“It’s a very important issue to the city of Thousand Oaks because it’s a source of revenue to the cities . . . and we feel it should continue,” said MaryJane Lazz, assistant city manager. She said Thousand Oaks is losing about $200,000 a year in drunk-driving fines. “We don’t feel the county is using it fully for the purpose they say they are.”

And Ventura City Manager John Baker estimated that his city loses about $200,000 a year in fines.

He said officials from all the cities have not met to decide whether they will appeal the ruling.

The cities sued last year, alleging that the county should pay the cities 84% of the fines collected from people who were arrested for drunk driving and given conditional sentences.

The lawsuit hinged upon a decision three years ago by Ventura Municipal Court judges, who began giving formal probation rather than conditional sentences to most drunk drivers receiving probation.

Under state law, formal probation requires convicted drunk drivers to report to county probation officers. Conditional sentences do not require them to report in person but merely to report in writing and obey the law or face charges of violating probation.

While the law on formal probation requires that all drunk driving fines go to the county, the one governing conditional sentences requires such fines to be split--84% to the cities where the drivers were arrested and the rest to the county.

But county attorneys argued that a conditional sentence is still probation because the drunk driver must report to the Probation Department. They claimed that fines should be kept in county coffers to help pay for overseeing the drivers after sentencing.

Attorneys for the 10 cities contended that a conditional sentence is not formal probation.

But Stevens’ filing said drunk drivers who must report in writing are in fact on formal probation.

The Santa Barbara County judge heard the case to avoid a conflict had a Ventura County judge heard the case.