1:35pm | As reported in the Los Angeles Times on February 12th, our State Government continues to work hard to solve our State’s budget crisis. How you ask? By making sure California Cities stop “raiding” State coffers by collecting and keeping their own traffic fines.
It seems that in response to increasing raids by the State into their own severely recession impacted budgets, City Governments have found a way to keep more of the income collected from traffic fines by issuing citations for violations of their own municipal codes, rather than for violations of the State’s Vehicle code. Long Beach is identified in the article as among the cities issuing traffic tickets under their own laws.
How dare we?
A larger percentage of these fines and fees go to the State when the Vehicle Code is used as the citation authority but a larger percentage remains with the City when the Municipal Code is used. Since both approaches have the same result, punishing a person for violating a rule of the road, the only real difference then is the amount of the fines (cheaper through the City) and where the money goes.
Yes dear readers, once again we see that many of our State-level elected officials just don’t seem to understand that California government doesn’t have an income problem, it has a spending problem. The enacted 2009-10 State Budget reflected a total income of almost $113 billion which represented an income increase of $5.7 billion from the previous year. But while we were giving Sacramento $5.7 billion more, they were busy spending $56.9 million beyond that.
So instead of seeing bills proposed to cut State spending we are seeing bills to prevent cities from—how did the sponsor, Democratic State Sen. Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach) put it again? Oh yes—“…rob(bing) the state of legitimate income.”
I find this interesting since it’s Long Beach cops that are writing the tickets and it’s Long Beach streets on which the violations are being alleged to have occurred so I’m at a bit of a loss to understand exactly why the State should be getting any portion of these fines and fees in the first place.
Surely when a State Highway is involved, like Pacific Coast Highway or Lakewood Boulevard for instance, the State should rightly see some of that income but otherwise I think Sacramento should simply butt out of our local business and work more on cutting its own voracious and persistent spending.
What do you think?