Advisers Tell Schools Superintendent to Return Any Bills for Tax Collection

The Ventura County superintendent of schools has been advised by attorneys to send back the bill if county supervisors charge his office for collecting property taxes.

Under a new state law, the County Board of Supervisors could charge school districts and the community college district a total of $3.1 million to collect property taxes.

A letter from the Schools Legal Service of Bakersfield addressed to County Schools Supt. James F. Cowan said the law does not take effect until Jan. 1, 1991, and any invoice received before then “should be returned to the county which generated it, along with a notation that there is no present legal authority for presentation of the invoice.”

The supervisors will vote Tuesday on whether to charge such fees.

Cowan said the county superintendent’s office is awaiting the board’s vote before taking a position on whether to pay the bill, which would amount to an estimated $134,000 for the superintendent’s office, which runs special education programs at several schools in the county.

“We’ll be doing a lot of research before we take any final position,” Cowan said. “We don’t know until we find out if they’re going to charge us. Once they do that, we’ll be deciding from there where we’re going to go.”

Attorneys from Schools Legal Service have advised 100 school districts that it represents statewide to return bills for the fees.

The letter said the fees are illegal because a state education statute prohibits counties from charging the fees. That law was not repealed or amended under the new legislation, the letter said.

But County Counsel James L. McBride said the county disagrees with the letter. McBride said that the intent of the legislation is to override previous laws and make the fees mandatory.

“The courts will have to decide, if it comes to that, if the legislation takes precedence” over the previous law, McBride said.

Costs to individual districts would range from $1,446 for the 31-student Santa Clara Elementary School District to $555,204 for the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Officials in other school districts, including Oxnard Elementary, have said they plan to return the invoices to the county if they are billed.

The letter advised school districts to seek legal advice if a county withholds property tax revenues to cover the fees or if a county sues the district to collect the fees.

The county counsel, which normally represents the superintendent of schools office in most legal matters, is representing the County Board of Supervisors on this issue, Cowan said.

“We haven’t seen any of the legal information that the county has put together,” Cowan said. “I would expect if there would be a lawsuit, a lot of districts statewide would be involved . . . but we’re way aways from that.”