A new bill to offer reductions in fines to people who do not contest their traffic summons may save police departments money but could also reduce state revenues from fines and surcharges.
Rep. Tim Marks, D-Pittston, has presented a bill that would give a 10 percent fine reduction to anyone that does not contest a traffic summons. The discount will encourage people to just pay the fines upfront and that will save money in court and processing costs and reduce law enforcement overtime, he said.
Many people just request the hearing on their traffic infractions just to see if the police officer will show up in court, Marks said.
“I can tell you that doesn’t happen very often because most police departments will pay overtime to their officers to go on their time off to guarantee their appearance,” he said.
Marks, who is a former State Trooper, said the Maine State Police and a lot of other police departments are contractually required to pay its officers a minimum of 4 hours of overtime to go to court on their days off.
By having fewer people contest the tickets, less overtime will need to be paid for officers to go to court, he said.
“I totally understand there’s some people who really do have a legal issues and want to see a judge, but it’s so few that actually go to trial,” Marks said.
“Here in Lincoln court, they might schedule a hundred cases for the morning session [and] they might have five trials out of those hundred, and what happens to the other 95? They’re either dismissed or plead down,” he said. Sometimes the reductions are small, and in other cases they could be half the total fine, he said.
“The [district attorney] wants to move the docket and he’s got officers waiting. There might be 20 police officers there waiting,” he said. “It all costs money.”
“It will make you sick to listen to the judges say, ‘Okay, this is a $200 fine, but we’ll knock a hundred off and give you a hundred dollar fine,'” Marks said.
The practice isn’t fair to the people who recognize they made a mistake and pay the full fine by mail, Marks said. “I never ever thought it was fair as a trooper.”
Marks said just how much money the fine reduction would save is hard to project, but he is confident it will save both the court system and police departments money.
Mary Ann Lynch, government and media counsel for the Maine Judicial Branch, said she testified before the Criminal Justice Committee that reducing fines for uncontested traffic infractions would reduce revenues to the state general fund by $888,000 to $1.1 million annually.
“Currently, on average 80 percent of traffic tickets are not contested and are paid by waiver,” Lynch said. “Over the past three fiscal years, the fine revenue collected for traffic infractions has ranged from approximately $11 million to $14 million.”
Fine surcharges that are dedicated to items like the jail fund and the Maine Criminal Justice Academy would also be reduced by $200,000-$300,000, Lynch said.
If enacting the bill did cause an increase in the number of tickets that are not contested, then the revenue reductions would be even greater, Lynch said.
Geoffrey Rushlau, the district attorney in Lincoln, Sagadahoc, Knox, and Waldo counties, said Marks’ experience with courts automatically reducing fines just for showing up “does not happen in my district.”
Sometimes people do receive reductions for showing they have no history of traffic violations or that they have a credible account of why their case is different than others, Rushlau said. On the other hand, some people with long records already pay their fines up front since judges can increase the standard fine or even suspend the operator’s license, he said.
“This is classically a case where the legislature has to decide what’s a fairer system and they have to balance the possibility of reduced revenue against the possibility that people will feel that they benefit by just paying it immediately,” Rushlau said.
Because prosecutors are all salaried employees, Marks’ bill wouldn’t save any money for the district attorney’s offices, Rushlau said.
“It sounds like all good reasons on the surface, however the purpose of those fines is to ensure some voluntary compliance – they’re supposed to hurt,” Cline said. “Someone thinks about getting a speeding ticket because it’s $185. They go ‘Wow, that stings a little bit.'”
Cline said research should be done about what the effects of Marks’ proposed bill will be, monetarily or otherwise. Because fines are a deterrent to violating the traffic laws, discounting those fines might affect how people choose to drive, and in turn affect the way law enforcement agencies operate, he said.
The Maine Chiefs of Police Association and Maine Sheriffs’ Association should have some input into the matter, Cline said. “I think that police administrators should have some interaction with the legislature to make sure we’re doing what’s fair and what’s right for the public,” he said.
Cline said his department has a total overtime budget of $7000 for the 2012-2013 fiscal year. As of March 11, only $2130 had been expended for overtime and $730 was court related, he said.
Sheriff Todd Brackett said the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office does not track court-related overtime separately and even if it did, it would be difficult to estimate how much was spent on traffic violations.
“I agree that, potentially, if it does decrease the amount of people who take a case to court, it could potentially decrease the amount of time our officers are needed in court,” Brackett said.
Boothbay Harbor Police Chief Bob Hasch said the effects on his department from Marks’ bill would be minimal.
“We issue traffic tickets but we’re not a huge traffic ticket agency,” Hasch said. “I can’t say it’s a tremendous burden on us overtime-wise to go to court.”
“It would be interesting to see [with] some of these bigger municipalities what the impact would be,” he said.
