City Officials’ Group Assails New Fees Law : Legislation: Delegates at a statewide convention criticize the Legislature for allowing counties to charge cities for such tasks as processing property tax bills and booking prisoners into jails.

Waving protest signs, about 3,000 city officials from across California demonstrated Monday against the state Legislature’s surprise passage of new fees that cities must pay to county governments.

In passing the state budget this year, the Legislature enacted a law allowing county governments to charge cities for processing their property tax bills and to charge fees for booking city prisoners in county jails. Cities never before had to shoulder those costs.

San Jose Councilwoman Iola Williams, state president of the League of California Cities that is meeting this week in Anaheim, said lawmakers realized they did not fund counties adequately in this year’s state budget. She said the Legislature’s solution was to tell county governments that they could obtain the needed money by imposing new fees on cities.

“It was like not giving a kid his allowance, but telling him to go out and mug someone to get it,” Williams said. “It’s costing cities millions of dollars. And we’re sending a clear message to the Legislature: we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.”

City officials want lawmakers to rescind the authority of the counties to impose the new fees, which came unexpectedly and at a time when most urban governments were already financially drained.

Williams said cities have been forced to cut their budgets to pay the new fees to county governments. Some counties are charging up to $180 per prisoner to book people into jail, she added.

“There’s no uniformity in the booking fee,” said Scott Summerfield, director of communications for the city of Newark in Northern California. “The cities are already seeing abuses in the law.”

Williams said the league worries that the booking fee may cause some police not to make arrests in money-strapped cities. “Police may be thinking, ‘Do I want my city to have pay $180 for this booking?’ ” she said. “It’s a problem I don’t want our police to have to face.”

During the protest, league delegates carried signs with messages for state lawmakers. One sign said: “Do your job; we’re doing ours.” Another said: “Don’t balance your budget on our back.”

“This was an impressive demonstration,” Summerfield said. “We’ve got some fired-up city officials here.”

Williams said the protest does not mean that cities are angry with counties about the budget situation, adding: “We’re angry at the Legislature and the (Deukmejian) Administration for doing this.”

Summerfield said the league estimated that at least 3,000 of 3,300 convention delegates took part in Monday’s demonstration outside the Anaheim Convention Center. The session began Sunday and lasts until Wednesday.