Judges Leaning to Fines Over Service for Small Offenses : Courts: Schools and parks get dirtier as municipal coffers fatten, but officials deny raising money was their aim.

Los Angeles Municipal Court judges are increasingly insisting that small-time offenders pay fines rather than letting them work off their debt to society by cleaning up parks, assisting nonprofit agencies or performing other services.

The result is that schools, parks and police stations, all of which rely to some degree on court referrals for maintenance work, are dirtier. Nonprofit agencies, such as senior citizens centers, chambers of commerce or charity thrift shops, are having to hunt down volunteers themselves or else pay to have work done.

Court referrals to the Volunteer Center of the San Fernando Valley, which administers the largest alternative sentencing program in the nation, are off more than 40% from a year ago. The number of offenders referred to the Volunteer Center of Los Angeles, which serves courts from East Los Angeles to Malibu, fell by a third during that period.

Court officials said the move away from routinely allowing traffic offenders and others the option of performing community services to avoid writing a check is not aimed at offsetting a several million dollar drop in court revenues this year. “Judges do not make sentencing recommendations based on revenue considerations,” said Presiding Judge Aviva K. Bobb.

Rather, she said, judges are merely following the law that requires them to consider an offender’s financial situation when making sentencing decisions. She said community service referrals countywide rose from about 45,000 in 1987 to 107,000 in 1990 and had continued their sharp rise until earlier this year.

“What really happened, I suspect, is that somewhere along the line it just developed that people were automatically being referred to community service,” she said. “I think there’s been a correction of that.”

Over the years, many agencies had come to depend on the court referrals as a source of free labor. TreePeople, a nonprofit environmental organization that last year planted 50,000 seedling trees around Los Angeles, provides an example.

Those referred to the Studio City-based agency worked 400 hours last April. So far this month, said operations manager Trish Luken, offenders assigned to TreePeople have worked 70 hours.

Tasks performed include clearing trails, mulching and making some minor repairs on buildings in Coldwater Canyon Park, where the agency is provided office space in return for park maintenance. “It’s invaluable to us,” Luken said, “and we lose dollars for our programs if we have to hire people to do what they do.”

Luken and others said they realize that all public agencies, including the courts, are operating on recession-tightened budgets and ordering more people to pay fines may raise more money. But, she said, the financial gain may be short-lived.

“At some point, we’re going to have to pay to get done some of the things we want to get done because we don’t have community service workers and I wonder if it will be more expensive than doing it this way,” she said.

Bobb said another reason that the number of people sentenced to perform community service began falling was that prosecutors filed 30% fewer cases involving driving under the influence last year compared to the previous year. The filing of charges in other types of minor cases went down 20%, she said.

But the trend away from community service sentences accelerated in October, soon after Bobb raised the issue in a discussion with the district’s judges.

That discussion came soon after Bobb received a memo from court administrator Edward M. Kritzman that urged limiting the option of community service to those who were indigent.

The memo also reportedly stated that levying more fines would help the court deal with a $2.6-million drop in revenue in its 1992-93 fiscal year budget. To illustrate his point, Kritzman cited the example of a judge who had nearly doubled his court’s revenues by strictly limiting the option of community service to those who were indigent.

Even so, Bobb said she believed judges should have complete discretion in sentencing and should not be influenced by the court system’s budget situation.

Between September and December, the referrals for community service by the San Fernando Municipal Court dropped by nearly 80%; the referrals dropped by 50% in Van Nuys during that period.

Judge Juelann K. Cathey, the supervising judge in San Fernando, said offenders given the option of performing community service fall into two categories. The orange-jacketed workers seen picking up trash along the highway, she said, are doing so to avoid a jail term and the number of people assigned those duties has stayed the same.

What has dropped dramatically is the number of people allowed to perform lighter community service duties in lieu of paying fines for most traffic offenses.

“If you are going to be privileged to drive in this state you ought to take the benefits with the burdens,” she said. “If someone makes an illegal left-hand turn or drives too fast or goes through a stop sign, why not give them the penalty imposed by the Legislature and make them pay a fine?

“I can’t help it if the March of Dimes gets worried or the thrift shops get worried that they aren’t getting workers,” she said.

But if the trend continues, the Volunteer Center of the San Fernando Valley might have to lay off some of the 25 workers who administer the community service program on behalf of about 300 agencies. The community service program is a major source of the center’s revenues, because offenders must pay a fee to participate.

“We’re just hanging in there, hoping things will change,” program director Pat Kortlander said.

She said imposing more fines was shortsighted, because the value of the work performed through the program is worth at least $11 million, far more than the amount raised by the fines.

“At least three schools a day call and ask for janitorial help because they’ve really been cut to the bare bones . . . and in the past we could fulfill these requirements and we’ve been unable to recently,” she said.

She said she remains convinced the court system’s own financial problems are driving the trend.

“I think mainly, and they don’t like to admit it, but they want to fill their coffers,” Kortlander said.