Failure to pay old fines has cost thousands of Vermonters their driving privileges. It’s become an especially big problem for lower-income residents. And state officials say they’ll introduce legislation next year that will help many of those drivers get back on the road.
Chauncey Liese, the chief of driver improvement at the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles, can still vividly recall a Friday back in March at the Chittenden County Courthouse on Main Street in Burlington.
“My staff arrived probably at seven and there was a line outside the courthouse. The temperature that day was below zero,” Liese said during a meeting of the Vermont Childhood Poverty Council Friday morning.
All those people, the first of whom arrived at midnight, weren’t there to buy concert tickets, or be first in line for a big sale. Rather they’d traveled from across the state to take advantage what state officials dubbed “driver-restoration day,” an event that proved more popular than Liese had anticipated.
“My numbers have more than 1,200 people and that involved 6,700-plus tickets that were processed on that day,” Liese says.
The one-day opportunity to satisfy old fines for $20 per unpaid ticket, however, only dented the problem. Thousands of Vermonters still have suspended licenses solely because they lack the means to pay old fines, some of which have nothing to do with driving.
Liese, Chittenden County State’s Attorney TJ Donovan and others say it’s time to reform a system that often serves to trap people in poverty.
“'Do I drive to go to work, to pick up my kid, or do I not drive because I know I’m suspended?' And then you have this other added issue of folks — we know they’re going to drive — driving without insurance. So it is a public safety issue, it is a fairness issue, it is an economic issue,” Donovan says.
"'Do I drive to go to work, to pick up my kid, or do I not drive because I know I'm suspended?'... it is a public safety issue, it is a fairness issue, it is an economic issue." - TJ Donovan, Chittenden County State’s Attorney
Liese is part of a task force created to study the issue. And he says the group plans to ask lawmakers to adopt legislation to address it.
“It is not final yet, it’s the process of still being reviewed by the task force,” Liese says.
Donovan says the bill ought to include a number of provisions, including waiving the $71 reinstatement fee people have to pay even after they make good on their tickets. He says the state should also stop suspending the licenses of people who fail to pay tickets for non-driving-related offenses, like minors in possession of tobacco or alcohol.
Donovan says it’ll help solve the plight of a man he met recently. Donovan says the recovering heroin addict is being held back by his inability to pay the nearly $300 he’d have to pay to get back his license.
“He’s sober, he’s working — give him the opportunity to retain employment by restoring his privilege to drive,” Donovan says.
In addressing the suspended license issue, Donovan says the state will not only help people get back on the road, but help relieve the burden on his courthouse of an offense that now accounts for 10 percent of the criminal caseload.
“And so for us it was 'look, we’re spending a lot of resources in terms of personnel prosecuting these cases where we’re not enhancing public safety,'” Donovan says.
Liese says the task force will also ask lawmakers to approve a bill nullifying all unpaid tickets from before 1991. He says the task force will have the driver-restoration legislation ready for the opening of the 2016 legislative session.
