Tax Increase Not the Answer to Jail Overcrowding Problem

In the recent Times editorial, “Cities Should Bite the Bullet, Absorb Fees,” The Times backed Senate Bill 2557 and the new policy of the state Legislature to use the already financially troubled cities as another source of revenue in order to resolve its own financial problems.

This concerns more than jail-booking fees, since the Legislature also authorized the county to collect fees from cities and school districts for property tax collection. These are services historically furnished to all county residents by county government and paid for by taxes on all county residents.

In The Times editorial history lesson on the effects of Proposition 13 on the counties, it failed to mention one very important fact: General law cities are unable to raise taxes to cover the loss in revenue from either Proposition 13 or from this new policy of the state and county governments taking funds from city coffers to cover their own shortfall. The counties, it is true, have been mandated by the state to provide services to the community without providing the funds to cover these services.

However, the state legislators are now encouraging the county to collect from the cities to cover any shortfall caused by the state. The bottom line is that the taxpayer in the incorporated cities in the county gets the bill for services provided to the entire county and the county government becomes a tax collector for the state.

This is not only unfair to the taxpayer, but can have disastrous effects on general law cities, which can only cut services, not raise taxes. The new jail-booking fees hit the smaller cities the hardest since they cannot afford their own jails and penalize the high crime-rate cities that already pay a high law enforcement bill.

CHUCK SMITH, Mayor, City of Westminster