New Parking Ticket Law Catches Some Cities Short : Jurisprudence: Responsibility for the citations transfers July 1. Many officials believed the change did not take effect until January.

Ventura County residents who want to contest parking tickets will soon have to take their case to City Hall instead of the county courthouse.

But unhappy motorists may find some of the county’s 10 cities more prepared than others to deal with their complaints.

Under provisions of a 1992 state law, cities must take over the job of holding hearings on contested parking tickets issued in their boundaries.

The wording of the law, however, has caused confusion about when it takes effect, which could leave some cities ill-prepared to handle their new duties.

Until a few weeks ago, officials in most cities around the county had been preparing to begin holding parking-citation hearings by Jan. 1, 1994.

But then city officials discovered that the county courts plan to hand over the parking-ticket business to the cities after the end of this month.

“Our position is the takeover is on July 1,” County Counsel James L. McBride said.

Linda Finn, deputy executive officer for the county’s courts, said she regrets that cities have misunderstood the date that the law takes effect. She said the county sent copies of the legislation to each of the cities in January, but only about half of the cities have called with questions.

Finn acknowledged that the law may be confusing, and said a cleanup bill clarifying the date it takes effect is on its way to the state Assembly.

In the meantime, some cities are scrambling to put together a system for hearing contested parking cases, while others are holding back until they are convinced that the county’s interpretation of the law is correct.

And still other cities, such as Santa Paula, were not even aware Thursday that the county was planning a July 1 changeover.

“That’s going to make it real interesting,” Santa Paula City Manager Arnold Dowdy said. “We were preparing for January 1.”

Santa Paula and most other cities in the county already issue and collect money on their own parking tickets, but refer people who want to contest the citations to Municipal Court.

After the new law takes effect, the cities will have to field complaints themselves, holding administrative hearings for drivers who say they were unfairly ticketed.

Motorists who are still not satisfied with the administrative hearing results can take their case to Municipal Court.

Dowdy said Santa Paula does not want to hire its own administrative hearing officer because the city has few cases of people contesting their parking tickets. “It could be described accurately as a handful,” he said.

So Santa Paula has been considering banding together with Ojai and Fillmore to hire a retired judge to hold administrative hearings for the three cities, Dowdy said.

If the July 1 date holds, the three cities will have to work fast to establish such a program, the city manager said.

Four other cities--Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Camarillo and Moorpark--are also considering jointly hiring a retired judge or former sheriff’s deputy under contract to handle administrative hearings on parking tickets. Together, the cities would probably have to pay less than $50,000 per year.

Anita Bingham, Camarillo’s finance director, said she learned only a few weeks ago from officials in another city that the county’s courts were pulling out of the parking-ticket business July 1.

“We were going along thinking it was January 1,” Bingham said. “It’s put all the cities in quite a bind trying to implement something more quickly than we had anticipated.”

On the county’s westside, Oxnard officials are still not convinced that the county’s courts are interpreting the state law correctly. As for preparing for the July 1 changeover, Treasury Manager Marge George said, “We haven’t done anything yet.”

But, she said, Oxnard officials also are exploring the possibility of joining with other cities to handle the new duties.

In Ventura, a police captain who is helping establish a system for hearing the city’s parking-ticket cases said he and other city officials had been laboring under the impression that they had six more months to get the system going.

Ventura Police Capt. Ken Thompson said city officials have talked to officials in other cities about joining with them in hiring a hearing officer.

But, Thompson said, “I’m not sure what we would do” if the changeover date is July 1 instead of Jan. 1.

Port Hueneme officials could not be reached for comment, but Finn said they were notified of the July 1 deadline.

The confusion may have arisen because the law gives counties that process parking tickets for all of their cities--such as Los Angeles County--until Jan. 1 to make the transition, Finn said.

But in counties such as Ventura County, where cities already process their own parking citations, the changeover must take place July 1, she said.