Sonoma County bail businesses fear the worst as California ends cash bail

Sept. 08--Sonoma County bail bond business owners say Gov. Jerry Brown dealt a potentially mortal blow to their industry last week when he signed a new law that will eliminate cash bail in the state by Oct. 1, 2019.

The industry, which includes more than 2,700 licensed bail agents and companies statewide, has already launched a counter attack, submitting paperwork for a proposed referendum that would stall the law and put the decision up to voters in November 2020. Bail supporters would need to gather more than 365,000 signatures to earn a place on the ballot.

Supporters of bail reform say the new law eliminates a financial burden in the justice system that weighs disproportionately on poor defendants. The new system, would instead consider a suspect's risk to public safety and their likelihood of appearing in court to determine whether they should be released.

The law's passage comes after two years of repeated calls by state leaders to enact reforms within the cash bail system. Senate Bill 10 cleared a final vote on the Senate floor by a 26-21 margin before heading to Brown's office for his approval.

But the measure goes too far and would effectively shutter a whole industry, said Steffan Gibbs, the CEO of All-Pro Bail Bonds, Inc., a business with 20 locations throughout state, including Santa Rosa. The local branch, located on Mendocino Avenue, employs six people but approximately 170 workers make up the entire company, Gibbs said.

"The bail business is in need of reform, there's no question about it," Gibbs said. "But is this reform? You got rid of it."

Statewide, more than 2,700 individual bail agents are licensed through the California Department of Insurance. In Sonoma County, 53 individual agents are licensed.

Rod Buntjer, owner of a Santa Rosa-based bail bond business, says his shop will likely be forced to close if the referendum is not successful. He said cash bail is the most reliable current way of getting defendants to show up in front of a judge after they are released from jail.

"If you don't have any skin in the game, there's no reason to appear in court," he said.

Gibbs favors a compromise -- a system that allows courts to conduct pretrial assessments but also gives defendants the option of paying bail if they don't qualify for release.

"It still protects your right to be presumed innocent," Gibbs said.

Other reforms he supports include creation of a statewide bail schedule and the elimination of stacked bail, in which defendants have to pay bail for each individual charge instead of the highest bail amount.

Supporters of the deeper overhaul point to several studies that call out disparities between defendants who can and cannot afford bail. The studies include a 2016 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit think tank focused on prison reform, that says 60 percent of the people who cannot post bail bonds in the U.S. fall within the poorest third of society. The median annual income for those defendants was $15,109.

Under the new system, both Gibbs and Buntjer are wary of how much discretion judges will have in deciding whether defendants can be released from jail, and under what conditions.

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