SACRAMENTO —— In a significant blow to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Sacramento superior court judge ruled Friday that he illegally delayed a state law requiring California hospitals to raise staffing ratios to one nurse for each five patients.

Judge Judy Holzer Hersher also issued a preliminary injunction canceling Schwarzenegger's emergency delay, a move administration officials quickly vowed to fight. The judge made her decision after the attorney general's office and California Hospital Association argued that she was overstepping her authority. The attorneys also argued that invalidating the governor's emergency action would endanger public health as well as hospital industry finances.

But the judge overruled their objections. She also declined requests to delay her injunction until they appeal her decision to a higher court.

"It means one to five is here now," said James Eggleston, attorney for the 60,000-member California Nurses Association, which sued Schwarzenegger last Dec. 21 over his administration's delay of the new staffing requirements. The ruling represents a high-profile setback for the governor and its immediate effects are unclear.

Still, a small group of Tri-City Medical Center nurses who traveled to Sacramento to rally outside the courthouse during today's hearing cheered the ruling, saying more nurses would make local hospitals safer and more patient-friendly.

"Everyone's really happy about this," said nurse Brenda Ham on a cell phone from the Sacramento airport as she and three other nurses prepared to board a flight home to San Diego. "I see things where we can do more for the patients but we just don't have the time. Maybe now we will."

Hospital industry officials said the ruling could prod many among California's 400 hospitals within about 10 days to boost their staffs by an estimated 4,000 nurses to meet the new ratios. Late last year, the Schwarzenegger administration estimated the new ratios would require 2,360 more nurses.

In a statement, Kim Belshe, Schwarzenegger's secretary of health and human services, said the administration "strongly rejects" the ruling and will try to stop it from immediately taking effect.

"We're confident in our actions, and we're not backing down," she said, noting the state's action is "legally solid, keeps patients safe and ensures access to care."

Duane Dauner, CHA president, also issued a statement, saying the ruling will make hospital service cuts "inevitable," and force hospitals to "choose between closing beds and eliminating patient care services."

Officials at North County's largest hospital district said the results of the ruling probably would not be so drastic at local hospitals, many of which say they have hired enough nurses to comply with the new rules, which were supposed to go into effect Jan. 1.

But until the judge's ruling, hospitals had the flexibility to admit more patients even if they did not have the number of nurses required by the ratios, said Lorie Shoemaker, chief nurse executive for Palomar Pomerado Health, which runs Palomar Medical Center in Escondido and Pomerado Hospital in Poway.

"We made a decision last year to staff whenever possible at one-to-five, but we've always had the leeway, if we couldn't meet the one-to-five ratio, to make it one-to-six," Shoemaker said.

But hospitals warn that the new ratios could mean longer waits for patients, especially in emergency rooms.

Medical and surgical units used to require one nurse for every six patients. With the new, lower ratio of one nurse for every five patients, emergency room patients who need to be admitted to the medical and surgical departments may have to wait longer for other patients to clear out, clogging up the emergency room and causing delays.

"There is a potential for slowdowns in admissions in the ER," Shoemaker said.

"We can't and won't turn patients away from the ER; federal law requires that we treat them," she said. "But when it's flu season and you've got 100 more patients that you usually staff for, there will be holdups."

The judge's ruling cemented a similar tentative ruling she issued Thursday, siding with nurses' arguments that Schwarzenegger and the state Department of Health Services acted illegally last Nov. 4 with an emergency order. It delayed the one-in-five ratios until 2008 while the DHS conducted new studies on the issue. The governor's emergency action also gave hospitals flexibility to override temporarily their emergency-room patient ratios during sudden, unexpected arrivals of patients.

Attorneys for the governor and CHA promised to appeal the ruling.

Hospitals now must have one nurse for each six patients in medical and surgical wings and one nurse for each four patients in emergency rooms. But a 1999 law required a new one-to-five ratio by Jan. 1.

Eggleston told the judge Friday that CNA sought the ratios —— the nation's first —— to combat "the managed-care philosophy of staffing, to make it so lean it becomes dangerous."

Hospital officials have long argued that strict adherence to the requirements forces them to turn away patients during crises. They also claim it will be nearly impossible to hire enough nurses to implement the stricter staffing ratios, saying the state already has 14,000 hospital nursing vacancies. The hospital industry says thousands of nurses have left the state, while the DHS estimates California will need 42,000 more nurses within five years.

State attorneys argued Friday that invalidating the governor's emergency action would also damage hospital finances.

"The harm to the public will be great if the injunction requires an immediate one-to-five ratio," argued Janie Daigle, a deputy attorney general representing the governor and DHS.

Daigle and CHA attorney Robert Leventhal argued that the DHS acted properly late last year in temporarily suspending the new ratios. They said problems arose for hospitals almost immediately after they implemented the one-in-six ratios in 2004 and required more time than originally expected before beginning even tougher requirements.

"We thought one year would be enough, but almost immediately upon implementation, reports started coming in," Daigle told the judge. Among them, hospitals were turning away patients because of nursing shortages, and some hospitals even closed because it damaged their financial conditions, according to the attorneys.

But in her ruling, Holzer Hersher held that the financial state of hospitals didn't give the state the ability to delay the law, saying its intent was to improve patient safety.

The ruling represented the newest turn in a running battle between the governor and the CNA, which has picketed his public appearances and run television ads critical of his decision. Schwarzenegger has labeled the CNA another of the state's "special interests," while the California Hospital Association has attacked the CNA as a small union that doesn't represent the majority of the state's 300,000 nurses