County’s Mad, but for 2 Cities It’s Just the Ticket : Finances: Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are no longer using the Municipal Court to collect on parking tickets. That will cost the county about $700,000 in lost revenues each year.

The cities of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are bypassing the Beverly Hills Municipal Court and acting on their own to collect several million dollars a year in parking fees, city officials said.

The new procedure means that Los Angeles County is being denied its previous share of parking ticket revenues--a yearly sum of about $700,000.

As a result, officials of the financially hard-pressed county government, which pays for the court’s operations, are pushing the cities to resume their previous procedures.

But officials of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills said they expect to keep the money for the foreseeable future.

“The system is working well . . . and I’m not sure why we’d want to change it,” Paul D. Brotzman, West Hollywood city manager, said Thursday.

“We are recognizing the obligation to pay something to the courts; recognizing but not paying,” said Beverly Hills’ finance manager, Don Oblander.

Although state law allows cities to do what West Hollywood and Beverly Hills have done, it requires the agreement of local courts, said Debbie Lizzari, an official in the office of the county’s chief administrative officer.

“From the cities’ viewpoint, they say we were properly informed, but from our point of view, we weren’t,” she said. “There is some dispute if the court has agreed to give up that responsibility.”

Previously, parking violators in the two cities were instructed to make their payments by mail or in person at the Beverly Hills Municipal Courthouse.

The money was deposited daily in a county bank account, and the cities would get monthly checks for their share of the revenue--89% in the case of West Hollywood and 86% in the case of Beverly Hills. The county kept the rest as a processing fee.

Now, violators are told to send their payments to Turbo Data, an Irvine-based data-processing company, where employees keep track of the paperwork and send the money directly to municipal coffers.

The yearly cost for Turbo Data’s services is expected to be $195,000 for West Hollywood this fiscal year, saving the city at least $100,000 in comparison to the sum that once went to the county. The dollar amounts are similar for Beverly Hills.

“This generates a fair amount of money,” Brotzman acknowledged, but he said money was not the only factor.

The change came after several citizens complained that their cars were towed for non-payment of fines even though the tickets were all paid, he said.

Upon investigation, it turned out that the courthouse staff was doing “a terrible job” in processing the tickets, Brotzman said.

“The clerks were way behind, and envelopes with checks were sitting in the courthouse,” he said.

Stanley M. Seidler, court administrator in Beverly Hills until he was fired last summer, blamed the delays on chronic staff shortages and drastic dips and gains in the volume of parking tickets every month.

“On some months, the cities might be down to 15,000, and some months they’d be up to 30,000, and with the county you can’t just have people on call to come in on short notice,” he said.

He said the court had asked for additional employees for years, only to be turned down by a cost-conscious county government.

Though the changes meant some savings in personnel costs for the county, “overall, it has cost us a serious revenue shortfall,” Lizzari said.

The parking revenues previously helped pay for the running of the courthouse, she said. Now that money has to come from the county’s $10.2-billion general fund.

“Most of the county’s budget is already mandated for general relief and health care,” she said. “So even though we’ve got a big budget, it’s still a lot of money for us to come up with.”

County attorneys are working to settle the dispute, but “it’s not moving as quickly as we’d like, to get some resolution,” she said.

Judge Charles Rubin, who recently took over as presiding judge in Beverly Hills, said West Hollywood’s action two years ago was taken “without consultation” with the court, which he also headed at that time.

When the city of Beverly Hills followed suit last summer, Judith Stein was the presiding judge, “and I don’t know what happened,” Rubin said.

Stein did not respond to a telephone request for comment, but Oblander said the court was aware of the city’s intentions.

“We had had discussions about it,” he said.

Brotzman said the court first farmed out the data-processing aspect of parking tickets several years ago, before West Hollywood was incorporated, and it only kept the responsibility for opening envelopes and depositing checks.

“The bulk of the responsibility they’d transferred at that time, and they’d given us the bill to pay for it, so the position our city attorney has taken on this is that they’d effectively agreed to the transfer at the time of incorporation,” he said.

Beverly Hills Mayor Allan L. Alexander said he was not aware of the dispute, but he expects a report from city staffers shortly, at which point the City Council will review its options.

West Hollywood Mayor John Heilman did not respond to a request for comment.

The city of Santa Monica, which also uses Turbo Data to keep track of its parking tickets, is considering a similar move, Finance Director Mike Dennis said.

City-paid clerks already help speed the collection process by opening envelopes at the offices of the Santa Monica Municipal Court, but the county still handles the money and gets 11% of the proceeds, court administrator Gerri Dassoff said.

The city of Los Angeles struck its own deal with the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1986. Under the agreement, the city processes its own traffic tickets but still pays the county 8% of the proceeds.