Sean C. Morgan
The city of Sweet Home has collected about $1 million in delinquent fines through its Municipal Court since it began turning unpaid fines over to a collections agency in 1999.
It has turned about $4.5 million in fines over to collections since then.
In 1998, the city had $1.1 million in outstanding fines, and the city turned to a collections agency the following year to begin collecting that cash. The city’s auditors would write off fines after 10 years.
The city hired an employee with a finance background specifically to start turning those fines over to collections and tracking the information, said Finance Director Pat Gray. “We couldn’t collect them any other way.”
It’s working, Gray said. Without aggressively pursuing the fines, the fines wouldn’t be collected otherwise.
The amount of unpaid fines is higher than in 1999, but some of the outstanding $3.5 million has been written off as well. During the 1990s, the amount of unpaid fines was already increasing, which prompted the decision to begin turning fines over to collections.
“I think you hve fewer people paying,” Gray said. “You hve a lot of people come in and just say, ‘Put it on my tab.’ They just can’t pay it.”
Some of the outstanding fines will never be collected, for a variety of reasons, Gray said. “Some of them, they’ll have to let go.”
Around three-fifths to two-thirds of Municipal Court fines are paid without going to collections, Gray said. This year, about 62 percent have paid their fines, while last year it was about 67 percent.
The city will have another ave-nue to collect fines beginning in the 2013 tax season, Gray said. That will be the first time the city is able to collect fines from state tax refunds.
The city also is changing the way it collects fines, Gray said. Jan. 2, the city will begin using nCourt to take electronic payments, saving the city merchant fees for accepting debit and credit cards. The nCourt service will directly charge the person making the payment.
The payments may be made by calling an 800 number and a payment station will be installed in the lobby of the Municipal Court, Gray said. The system is already in use by nearby courts, including Brownsville and Lebanon.
The court will continue to accept cash payments, she said.
In the first four months of the fiscal year 2012-13, July through October, the city received $61,000 in payments along with another $7,300 for the state. A portion of each fine is sent to the state, based on the type of violation. This year the state’s cut was about 9.3 percent of the total collected. The city also collected another $26,000 from the collections service.
In the same period of 2011, the city received $67,000, with another $12,000 sent to the state, about 7 percent of the total collected. The city received $26,000 from the collections service.
From July to October, the city turned over $400,000 to collections, including a large code enforcement fine that remains unpaid. A year ago, it turned over $86,500 to collections in the same quarter.
The total number of citations the court handled decreased from 369 in July through October of 2011 to 302 in the same period this year.