Thursday, March 16, 2006 | 6:49 a.m.
As if it wasn't bad enough to get a traffic ticket, people trying to take care of them in Las Vegas Justice Court may have an additional headache.
The court can't process the tickets fast enough, which means people going to court may run into a bureaucratic mess - there's no record of their ticket.
"It's bad enough people have to take off work to come down and take care of their tickets and even worse if they arrive to find out their ticket isn't in the system," Chief Justice of the Peace James Bixler said. "We have gotten calls from many people, and these calls have been horrid.
"It's the worst situation. It really couldn't be any worse as per the lack of response we are giving customers."
Court Executive Officer Chuck Short, who has been in charge of Justice Court operations since its consolidation with District Court in September, said he recently learned of the problem, being told many people were either calling or showing up at traffic court and finding there was no record of the ticket in the computer system.
Las Vegas Justice Court handles traffic tickets issued in unincorporated Clark County. Citations issued in incorporated cities pass through the respective municipal courts, such as Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas.
About 220,000 tickets - an average of 18,300 a month - are written each year in unincorporated Clark County, and thousands of people call or visit traffic court each week.
But only two people enter the tickets into the system.
In December, 15,000 traffic tickets written weren't put into the court system's computers. At the end of February court statistics showed that 12,000 tickets written didn't make it into the system, Short said.
Short said starting April 1 traffic tickets will be processed by Access Inc., a private company, on a three-month trial basis. He said the company should be able to cut the entry time from 30 days to three.
If the interactive phone and Internet systems for jury selection is successful, a similar system could be used to help the traffic court to handle its workload, Short said.
Short estimated that out of the 220,000 traffic tickets handled by Las Vegas Justice Court, 140,000 are issued by Metro Police, 35,000 by Nevada Highway Patrol and the remainder by a combination of Henderson Police officers, School District police and other law enforcement agencies.
Metro has 110 traffic officers using hand-held computers who write between 60 to 70 percent of Metro's tickets. While those tickets are sent electronically to court, they still have to be entered by hand into the court's computer system.
The rest of the tickets are mailed to the courthouse.
Short is proposing helping law enforcement buy hand-held computers to enter traffic tickets directly into the traffic court's computer system. He said police agencies could be paid a small amount per citation entered as an incentive to buy the equipment.
"Within a matter of hours tickets can be processed into the system instead of days, weeks and months," Short said.
Capt. Tom Conlin of Metro's transportation safety bureau, said his agency is willing to explore the proposal, but he said he wasn't sure if it would be legal for the courts to give money to the police.
He also said the proposal touches a "sensitive issue" because Metro doesn't want the public to think the program boils down to "the more tickets Metro writes, the more money Metro gets."
While court officials hope to have the problem ironed out soon, Bixler said, people with traffic tickets should call the Traffic Division and show up on the appearance date written on the ticket to avoid an arrest warrant.
"As long as they show up on the date given on the ticket, we can find alternative ways to handle their citation that will not make them miss another day of work to come down in person," Bixler said.
The traffic ticket backlog is the latest problem to surface in Las Vegas Justice Court in regard to traffic tickets.
A report released last October said the court has failed to collect $61 million in traffic fines - about half of the fines it imposes.
Traffic cases accounted for 64 percent of the 321,336 cases handled in Justice Court in 2004, according to the report.
Short said Las Vegas Justice Court collected 18 percent more in traffic fines in 2005 than it did in 2004 and plans to step up collection efforts internally and hire a collection agency this year.
In following other recommendations laid out in the Clark County report, Short said people who wish to plead guilty and pay their fines will be able to do so by phone starting in April and online in August.
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