Counties traditionallounties traditionallounties traditionally haven haven haven’t had t had t had t had much recourse to take when tracking down residents with overdue traffic citations. A resident who doesn’t pay can go years without having to answer a citation, until his or her driver’s license needs renewing or, longer still, until they are caught having driving with an expired license.
But there is one tool out there that has been successful at collecting those overdue fines: a software program created by Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) that is tied to the statewide Registration and Titling System. The program, which tracks whether a person owes fees and fines to a city or county according to his or her license plate and vehicle identification numbers, costs little but has reaped significant awards for El Paso County, one of the few counties to utilize the tool.
From June 2004 through June 2008, El Paso Tax Assessor Collector Victor Flores collected nearly $1.7 million for his counties’ justice of the peace courts, dispute resolution office and county attorney’s office combined, as well as more than $1.6 million for the City of El Paso. In addition, the program helped clear 10,730 warrants for the city and 9,400 warrants for the county during that same time period. All the warrants were related to scofflaws — residents who were avoiding paying fines and fees, for whatever reason. What prompted all those residents to finally pay up? Flores uses the TxDOT tool to refuse vehicle registration to residents with overdue fines.
“Let’s say you come in to register a vehicle and you have an outstanding traffic ticket. The clerk looks up your VIN number in the system and it says you owe (Justice of the Peace 5) X amount. The clerk gives the person an instruction letter that says, ‘Go to JP 5 and settle whatever debts you have outstanding.’ The clerk at the JP’s office looks up your name and says, ‘You have a warrant.’ So you pay the ticket, and the JP clerk will give you a clearance letter that says you came in on this day and paid this amount and you’re all clear. Then you come back to the tax office and we renew your vehicle registration,”
said David Marquez, the enforcement director for the El Paso Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office, adding that residents who do not pay their fines do spend time in jail. “You are going to spend an average of three or four days in county jail and when you’re released, you don’t owe the money any more.”
In order to utilize the tool, the county had to sign a contract with TxDOT and create its own local data information, since the TxDOT system simply tells clerks whether a person has been flagged or not. It doesn’t tell the clerk to which department specifically the money is owed. The county gathers information locally about which residents need to be flagged and which flags need to be cleared. That information is sent to TxDOT on a regular basis, via CD. The only costs to the county are a 12-cent fee charged every time a resident is flagged — not for the search itself — and $23 dollars for each CD.
The county also makes money through inter-local agreements with area cities; El Paso pays the county 10 percent of the collections raised through the program in exchange for the county’s help in enforcing payment of city fees and fines.
“It’s a piece of cake, and you don’t have to invest a lot in it,” said Monica Miranda, the scofflaw program coordinator in the El Paso Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office.
Since all tax assessor-collectors have access to the Registration and Titling System, clerks in other counties can see if a person has been flagged for non-payment. For instance, Marquez remembered one situation in which a former El Paso resident attempted to register his vehicle in Tarrant County. The Tarrant County employee noticed the flag, called the El Paso Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office, determined why the flag was there and the amount owed to the county, and had the resident send El Paso a money order for the fine. Once the situation was cleared, the person was able to register his vehicle in Tarrant County.
Marquez said the county has not experienced any downside to using the TxDOT tool.
The authority to withhold vehicle registration from residents who have overdue fees and fines dates back to 1997, when the 75th Legislature adopted Texas Transportation Code 502.185 via House Bill 1532. But so far few counties have taken advantage of the tool, said Jim Lehman, the executive director of the Texas Office of Court Administration.
The Llano County Commissioners Court ratified the program back in June to help collect its $156,000 in outstanding fees and fines, and several other counties including Kaufman, Harris and Ector also use the tool to some degree.
“We obviously think that it’s a good program,” Lehman said. “It makes sense for counties to cooperate and be able to pull together for a common interest.” Lehman said he believes officials either have not heard about the scofflaw software and authority, do not believe the program would benefit the county financially, or are worried about possible political ramifications from angry residents who for some reason haven’t paid their fees and fines.
“Initially, they saw this and said, this is not something we want to pursue,” Lehman said, adding that there was a fear that residents would not only not pay their fees and fines, but would also not pay for their vehicle registration, and the county would lose money.
But that hasn’t happened in El Paso. Staff in the tax assessor-collector’s office — which also runs an anonymous Vehicle Registration Abuse hotline — said the Democrat has run unopposed since implementing the program. That’s despite statistics showing that the program targets about 10 percent of the county’s drivers. According to a July 2007 report, approximately 78,000 El Pasoans had outstanding warrants for their arrests, mostly due to unpaid traffic citations.
“You have to understand that 80 to 90 percent of the people anywhere are law-abiding citizens. They get a ticket, they pay it or they go to court. Y You always have your 5 to 10 percent that will not pay their tickets … Nine out of 10 times, those people don’t even vote,” Marquez said, adding that the money collected helps run local government departments without having to withdraw from the entity’s general fund. “You have a fiscal responsibility to bring in monies that are owed to you.”
The TxDOT tool applies to any fee or fine that can be tied to a person’s license plate or vehicle identification number, so most resulting collections are due to the local justices of the peace offices and pertain to Class C misdemeanor traffic citations, though El Paso also refuses to register vehicles for persons who owe fines to the dispute resolution and county attorney offices as well. Since county officials are in charge of the internal system and assigning flags to residents, they also choose which fines to include. “Class Cs are 80 to 85 percent of criminal fees anyway, so that’s the biggest piece of collections,” Lehman said, adding that it’s similar to the OmniBase Services of Texas program, which is tied to driver’s license renewal. The only difference is that driver’s licenses are renewed every six years, instead of yearly. According to the Omnibase Web site, 228 counties participate in that program.
Lehman said he believes the vehicle registration program is easier to enforce.
“It’s on the windshield, it’s not on someone’s pocket or purse. We have law enforcement that is very good at seeing expired registrations, so it has a more immediate impact,” he said.
Counties that take advantage of the resource also have the option of using the threat of not renewing vehicle registrations; in other words, it’s still lawful to renew registration for residents, flag or no flag.
“Have a major media and notification campaign to make everyone aware that this process is going into place,” Lehman said, calling the flag a soft stop. “Make sure they do a really good campaign so that the word is out, much the same way that you do a warrant round-up. … I think you would probably be successful in approaching it from that standpoint.”
While safety for county employees may be a concern, Lehman said tax assessor-collector offices already have to deal with upset drivers who are denied vehicle registration due to other reasons, such as when a vehicle fails an emissions test. El Paso has not had any safety issues arise because of the program, Marquez said.
“All the ideas about why we shouldn’t do it have been done away by the program that El Paso has implemented,” Lehman said.