Cities Ready to Settle Over Booking Fees

Ventura County’s cities are reluctantly concluding that they will have to pay more for the criminals captured within their borders.

So an end could be near in the cities’ four-year legal battle with the county over nearly $4 million in jail booking fees, several mayors and other city officials acknowledged Tuesday.

“I think that we recognize that we have to pay,” Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez said. County officials said Oxnard owes $781,560, the largest booking bill in the county.

Oxnard and the nine other Ventura County cities have stood united in refusing to pay the county’s booking fee of $120 per prisoner.

But Tuesday, Camarillo City Manager Bill Little presented a tentative settlement offer to the eight mayors at an early-morning, closed-door meeting of the Assn. of Ventura County Cities at Camarillo City Hall. Oxnard and Fillmore were not represented.

Little refused to disclose details of the offer, but said a majority of the mayors present supported taking the offer to the county. First, the mayors must formally approve a written offer and return it to their city councils for ratification.

“There’s still a ways to go,” Little said. “(But) there was support there to move on.”

Moorpark Mayor Paul Lawrason, chairman of the mayors’ group, agreed that a majority of the cities now seem ready to settle.

The cities sued the county shortly after the fee was levied in 1991 and made retroactive to July, 1990. The cities refused to pay, and the county retaliated by withholding almost $700,000 in property taxes due the municipalities in 1990 and 1991.

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A Sacramento Superior Court judge ruled that action illegal and ordered the money returned in December, 1991. But county officials have refused and the money sits in a special fund, awaiting the outcome of the legal wrangling.

Until recently, little movement had been made toward a settlement, and Ventura County remains one of only three California counties that has not resolved the issue.

“Everybody else in the state has worked this out,” Assistant County Counsel Noel Klebaum said. “But the (local) cities have really dug their heels in on this one.”

In addition to the $700,000 impounded, local cities have been billed for more than $3 million. Officials in Oxnard and some other cities said they have set aside money to pay the booking fees if they eventually lose in court.

The Legislature in 1990 allowed counties to charge cities the booking fees to make up for lost state revenue. Cities statewide sued, claiming that the fee was unconstitutional. But Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James T. Ford ruled in 1992 that counties could legally collect the fee.

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“It is another fallout from Proposition 13,” Ford said of his ruling during an interview Tuesday. That measure empowered the Legislature to establish tax policy, he said. Therefore, state lawmakers’ passage of the booking fee law is constitutional, Ford ruled.

Ford, who appointed a financial expert to evaluate the case, said he hopes to rule on it in the next several weeks. The so-called referee’s opinion will provide a basis for determining what is a reasonable booking fee in Ventura County.

“I presume an appeal is forthcoming as soon as there is a final judgment,” Ford said, adding that he was not aware of the settlement discussions.

In 1992, Ford also ruled that cities that contract with counties for police protection may not have to pay the booking fee, depending on how the contracts were written. Five of the county’s cities contract with the Sheriff’s Department for police protection, but county officials continue to bill each city.

The question remaining before Ford issues his final judgment is the cost of fingerprinting, photographing and processing each person arrested in the county. The county has fixed that cost at $120 per person.

“It’s too much,” Little said. “It is not a well-accounted-for fee.”

Sheriff’s officials disagreed, saying the $120 booking fee is not enough.

“We’re about to raise the fee to $150,” Undersheriff Richard S. Bryce said Tuesday.

Bryce added that the Sheriff’s Department hopes for an end to the dispute because “a lot of people have not been arrested that should have.” He said arrest rates--particularly in Ventura and Oxnard--have dropped dramatically since the County Board of Supervisors approved the booking fee.

Oxnard Police Chief Harold Hurtt said the drop in the arrest rate had nothing to do with the booking fee. But his predecessor, former Chief Roberts P. Owens, said the fee forced his department to cut back on bookings in minor criminal cases.

Ventura Police Capt. Kenneth Thompson said his department is issuing tickets instead of arresting petty thieves and other nonviolent, misdemeanor offenders.

“We did some policy adjustments,” he said. “We are citing some people rather than booking them.”