County’s Proposed Jail Booking Fee of $183 Draws Anger From Cities : Budget: State slashes force the county to recover the ‘full cost’ of jailing prisoners. But civic layoffs and police cuts may result.

Representatives of several Orange County cities emerged from a tense session with county budget officials Thursday complaining that a proposed jail booking fee would force layoffs and serious cutbacks in city services, including police protection.

“It would be a financial disaster,” said Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young, who did not attend the meeting but was told of the county proposal. “It would result in complete chaos in our Police Department and would force layoffs at a time when we’ve been adding officers.”

“This would not only be a financial disaster for the city of Santa Ana, but it would create a public safety crisis in Orange County,” added Young, whose concerns were echoed by outraged officials in other cities.

If the fee is approved by county supervisors in January, city and school district police will for the first time have to pay for booking suspects into county jails. And though city and county officials have discussed such a fee for months, the county has developed new cost estimates that have increased the proposed fee from $75.50 per inmate to $183.

Santa Ana, which would be hit hardest by the proposal, would lose more than $3 million over a full year, according to the county estimate presented to city officials Thursday.

But Young said the cost would be more than twice that because county officials underestimate the number of suspects Santa Ana places behind bars.

Santa Ana’s police budget for this year is about $40 million. Young said the city would lose about 20% of that if a $183 booking fee is imposed.

Even before the $183 figure was developed, city officials were in uproar and had banded together to resist the new fee under the banner of what they called Operation Budget Freedom.

Thursday, after they received official word of the proposed higher figure, some city officials were angered and demanded answers for how the cost estimates had jumped so dramatically.

Irvine City Manager Paul O. Brady Jr. said: “I’m not going to stand still for losing police officers or cutting services in our community because the county has been hit with a cut in its budget from the state. I can’t understand this. They need to justify this to us.”

Robert F. Dinsen, a councilman from Garden Grove, said layoffs, salary cuts and the loss of a fire station could be the price that his city would pay if slapped with the fee.

“It would have a devastating effect on the city,” he said.

County officials have been sympathetic to those concerns, but they face huge budget problems of their own, many of them caused by the state. Without some sort of fee, the county could be forced to consider layoffs, the postponement of a long-sought earthquake safety renovation or other cutbacks.

The jail booking fee arises from this year’s budget debate in Sacramento. Desperate to make up a huge shortfall, the state government dramatically slashed funding for counties in its 1990-91 budget. To make up for the funding it took away from counties, the state allowed them to begin charging fees for jail booking and other things.

Under the new state law, counties are allowed to recover the “full cost” of booking. Orange County officials, who have spent the past several weeks studying the cost of placing inmates into the jail system, now estimate that $183 per inmate would represent recovery of full costs, including medical expenses.

“I understand that they (county officials) have a budget problem, but this is crazy,” said Bill Hodge, executive director of the Orange County division of the League of Cities. “We want to try to help out, but first we were talking about $75.50, and that was bad enough. Now staff’s saying that the real number is 2 1/2 times that.”

Hodge added that city officials are confronting many of the same fiscal problems faced by the county.

“They talk about the slowdown in the economy and the rising price of energy,” Hodge said. “But we have the same problems. It’s not like city cars don’t run on gasoline.”

Vicki Stewart, an official in the county administrative office and one of those who represented the county at Thursday’s meeting, declined to comment on the session.

“We’re negotiating with them, and I’m not at liberty to release any information,” she said.

Other officials who attended the meeting, however, provided a copy of a county document estimating the revenue that could be generated from imposing the fee. All told, the $183-per-inmate levy would raise $9.7 million for the county over one year, according to county projections.

If imposed in January and not made retroactive to July 1, the fee could add $4.8 million to this year’s strapped county budget and could help save several embattled programs. But while that money would help the county out of a difficult impasse, city officials say that the cost to their programs could be devastating.

For some city officials, particularly troublesome is the concern that the county may be artificially inflating its costs to give supervisors bargaining room when they consider the matter in January.

“That’s a possibility we have contemplated and that we have met to talk about,” Brady said. “All I can say is I hope they’re not playing games with us.”

Times correspondent Jon Nalick contributed to this report. IMPACT OF JAIL BOOKING FEES

County budget officials want to charge cities for every suspect they place in the Orange County jail system. To recover all costs, the fee would be $183 per inmate, county officials say. City officials said that would cripple their law enforcement budgets. At $183 per booking, fees for 22 county cities would amount to:

Annual Annual City Bookings Fees * Santa Ana 16,476 $3,015,108 Orange 6,624 $1,212,192 Garden Grove 5,592 $1,023,336 Anaheim 3,072 $562,176 Irvine 2,568 $469,944 Cypress 2,136 $390,888 Costa Mesa 2,100 $384,300 Tustin 2,100 $384,300 Westminster 1,848 $338,184 Buena Park 1,596 $292,068 Newport Beach 1,380 $252,540 Laguna Beach 1,272 $232,776 Huntington Beach 1,164 $213,012 Placentia 1,116 $204,228 Brea/Yorba Linda 888 $162,504 Fountain Valley 852 $155,916 La Habra 660 $120,780 Fullerton 576 $105,408 Los Alamitos 396 $72,468 Seal Beach 312 $57,096 La Palma 264 $48,312 San Clemente 156 $28,548 Total 53,148 $9,726,084

* based on county projections

Source: Orange County Administrative Office