County, Cities Settle Suit Over Jail Booking Fee

Ventura County officials and representatives of the county’s 10 cities agreed Tuesday to settle a four-year, multimillion-dollar lawsuit over prisoner booking fees.

The cities have agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million of the money owed to the county for booking prisoners between 1990 and 1994. In return, the county has agreed to stop billing the cities and instead charge convicted criminals $100 each time they are booked into Ventura County Jail.

Fees will not be collected from prisoners who are not convicted and officials expect to collect from only about half of those convicted. Still, both sides heralded the agreement as a major fence mender between county and city officials.

Sheriff Larry Carpenter said the booking fee issue has meant that some nonviolent criminals, such as thieves and drug users, have been issued tickets instead of spending time behind bars as cities struggled to balance their budgets.

Now, beat cops can book prisoners into jail without worrying about the bottom line, Carpenter said.

“I’ve always felt that making a financial decision like that to be inappropriate,” he said.

Ventura County is one of the last of the state’s 58 counties to settle this long-simmering dispute that strained relations between county and city officials.

Five years ago, the California Legislature passed a law that allowed counties to bill police departments for booking prisoners into jail.

The county started levying booking fees of $120 per prisoner shortly afterward and began billing the cities for every person booked into the jail. The cities united, sued the county and ignored the bills, which totaled more than $3.5 million by the end of last year.

In response, the county refused to release $696,960 in taxes collected in 1990-91 that was due the cities.

“It’s kind of like the state is in the stands watching us fight in the arena,” Thousand Oaks City Manager Grant Brimhall said.

Scores of other cities throughout the state also sued their respective counties, alleging that the fees were unconstitutional.

Sacramento Superior Court Judge James T. Ford consolidated the lawsuits and heard them all at once.

But Ford ruled two years ago that the booking fees were legal, at which point most of the cities settled their lawsuits. But the Ventura County cities argued that $120 per prisoner was unreasonable.

Furthermore, Ford’s ruling also pitted the five cities with their own police forces against the five cities that contract with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department for public safety.

Ford said Ventura County could not charge the contract cities the fee unless the contracts were rewritten. But the non-contract cities took exception to being the only entities that had to pay booking fees.

In the end, the contract cities agreed to shoulder some of the settlement, though they pay less than the cities with independent police departments.

“We went further than we had to,” said Camarillo City Manger Bill Little. Camarillo contracts with the county for police service. But Little said it was worth the $51,480 his city agreed to pay for the lawsuit to go away.

Of the four other contract cities, Thousand Oaks will pay $113,760; Moorpark, $36,120; Fillmore, $25,440, and Ojai, $21,840.

For the five non-contract cities, the cost will be $477,660 for Oxnard; $435,100 for Simi Valley; $411,720 for Ventura; $56,740 for Santa Paula, and $53,560 for Port Hueneme.

The contract cities will pay their fees out of the tax money the county seized four years ago while all of the non-contract cities said they have been putting money aside in anticipation of the settlement.