Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Answers: Clark County:

Policy on old traffic tickets may become less forgiving

Turkey crossing the road

Kyle B. Hansen

A Metro Police officer pulls over a motorist who failed to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2010, on Charleston Boulevard.

Steve Sisolak

Steve Sisolak

Drivers who thought they’d see their unpaid traffic tickets forgiven after five years, a Clark County tradition, may not be so lucky this year. After a county commissioner raised questions about the practice, Las Vegas Justice Court has rescinded an order to dismiss old traffic tickets. Now the court will take a look to see what kind of money it might be able to collect on those old tickets.

No one knows what kind of money we’re talking about?

Not really. Wild figures have been tossed around from $49 million to $32 million to the single-digit millions.

How did old traffic tickets ever become an issue?

Money. As in, Clark County is scraping for every dime, and the county pays much of the operational costs of the court system. Commissioner Steve Sisolak said word came to his office that Karen Bennett, chief judge of the Las Vegas Township Justice Court, signed the dismissal order in February. But Bennett rescinded the order recently because Sisolak started asking questions.

What’s Bennett going to do now?

Not only is she going to see if there is some way to collect a portion of the outstanding fines, but she is also going to examine the process to see if the long tradition should be tossed out altogether. It’s been in place so long, when she became chief judge she said she was merely doing what her predecessors had done.

Although state law allows dismissals after five years, she said, “maybe we can learn from a review of the process, and if we can bring in more money, I’m definitely willing to do it.”

She also will need staff to go through years of tickets to see which ones went through the court process already and those that did not. Just because someone didn’t show up for a court date, and a bench warrant was issued, does not mean they automatically have to pay a fine. Everyone still has the right to appear in court.

Sounds like a headache. What’s the potential payoff?

Since October, Bennett said, Justice Court began using a bill collection agency, NCO. The agency has predicted that going after very old tickets — again, only those that had gone through the court process — could reap revenues of anywhere from $2 million to $8 million.

And what is NCO’s cut?

By contract, NCO gets 10.9 percent of every delinquent ticket it collects. Bennett has numbers showing that the collection agency is doing wonders for Justice Court’s bottom line. Since October, NCO has collected $2.1 million, with collections projected at $2.7 million by June 30, the end of the current fiscal year. The total amount that Justice Court has collected this year, including fines paid by people right away without nagging by a collection agency, is projected to be $4.5 million this year.

How does that compare to previous years?

It’s a huge amount more. In fiscal year 2010, Justice Court collected just $2.7 million.

Is there any way to gauge how likely it is to collect on tickets that are five years or more older?

Bennett’s office had some figures showing that the farther back you go from the initial ticket, the less likely you are to get money. Here’s what the figures show: Over the past fiscal year so far, Justice Court collected on 6,724 traffic cases. A full 92 percent of those collections were for tickets written within the past five years. The remaining 8 percent of collected fines were written from 1996 to 2005.

Bennett said investigating old tickets to see which ones Justice Court has the right to collect on is a process worth doing. “It’s going to help us more than hurt us because we’ll have a good assessment of our data instead of stacking all the tickets together,” she said.

The best part, she added, is that once it’s done, the court will be up to date, and it won’t have to do it again.

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