Santa Ana Seeks Stiffer Code Violator Penalties : Courts: City officials want judges to regard seriously flagrant ordinance offenders in such areas as overcrowding and street vending.

SANTA ANA —  After months of attempting to meet with municipal judges to ask for stiffer penalties against those who frequently break city ordinances, local leaders have received a commitment from the court’s presiding judge to meet with neighborhood groups to hear their concerns.

Councilman Robert L. Richardson, who spearheaded the effort, and Judge James M. Brooks said that their meeting this week resulted in Brooks’ promise to meet with residents’ groups and relay their issues to the 12 other Central Municipal Court judges.

Although Richardson initially had requested a meeting with all the judges, Brooks said the other judges should not meet with neighborhood leaders because they would be compromised if they heard about a case that might end up in their courts.

“I cannot taint the judges by having them go out to the scene of evidence, if you will,” said Brooks, who as the presiding judge does not hear cases.

Richardson, who was satisfied with the outcome, said officials “want the judges to understand that if a case arrives there, it’s because all of the other (administrative) methods have fallen short.”

Concerned about the deterioration of neighborhoods, city and neighborhood association leaders have joined forces to step up enforcement of ordinances related to such issues as residential overcrowding, homelessness and street vending.

Bristol Manor Assn. Chairman Kim McPeck, a member of the city delegation that met with Brooks, said that through neighborhood “nasty-grams”--distributed by the neighborhood groups to residents violating city codes--and the city’s warning letters, most of the cases are settled before they reach the courts.

The flagrant violators, he added, are the ones who go before the judges.

But city and neighborhood leaders have long felt frustrated that the judges were not taking their cases seriously. In one instance, city officials said, they were told by the court not to bring up cases against illegal yard sales because they were not considered major crimes.

“The (judges) were sitting there thinking, ‘They are sending up every problem they have got,’ ” McPeck said. “That was not the case.”

Richardson added: “Maybe some of the cases may not seem as important as other crimes that come in there. But they are not arriving there because they are unimportant. They are arriving there because our other methods have fallen short.”

Brooks said he could not guarantee the outcome of cases, nor would he concede that the judges have not taken the city’s cases seriously.

“But if there is that perception, then we have to correct that perception,” the judge said.