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LA County says not so fast on wedding license fee increase after chapel outcry
A wedding in Los Angeles County.
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Gary Friedman
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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Topline:
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday put on hold a plan to dramatically increase wedding license fees, responding to an outcry from wedding chapels.
The details: Last month, the board initially approved an increase in the cost of a standard marriage license from $91 to $176. The board was scheduled to give final approval Tuesday but instead voted to send the issue back to the county clerk for review.
The cost of a confidential marriage license, which allows people to marry privately without public record, with no witnesses for the ceremony and with restricted access to the marriage certificate, would have gone up from $85 to $220.
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Wedding chapels respond: Alan Katz, a spokesperson for the Wedding Chapel Coalition, argued the increase would prompt people to get married in Orange County, where the fee is $61, and hurt the wedding chapel business in L.A. County.
“The proposed increase was ludicrous,” said Katz, who owns the Cute Little Wedding Chapel in Long Beach. “Not every wedding in L.A. County is the big, glitzy, glamorous one. Those people, they don’t care. It's the everyday people, the people who are on low or fixed income, those are the ones that are going to get affected by this.”
County clerk: County Clerk Dean Logan had said the fee increases were needed to cover the rising cost of providing the service, noting the fees had not changed since 2009. A spokesperson said an updated proposal may be brought back to the Board of Supervisors at a future date.
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