Here’s an update on the Texas Driver Responsibility Program, which was created in 2003 as a way to raise revenue by adding hefty extra fees to certain moving violations.
“It’s a complete failure,” said state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, who sponsored unsuccessful legislation to kill the program last year. Shapleigh was able to insert language into a related bill that would waive surcharges for indigent Texans, but it won’t be effective until the fall of 2011, and then only if it has no significant impact on the state budget.
“What’s happening is that people can’t pay their fines, and then they lose their driver’s license. That means they can’t get to work,” he said. “It has a snowball effect that’s hurting a large number of citizens.”
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But the program never worked as planned. More than 60 percent of the surcharges – $1.05 billion – has not been paid. Of the 1.9 million Texas drivers who have been told to pay, about 1.2 million have not, nearly two-thirds of those in the Driver Responsibility Program. If drivers don’t pay, their licenses are automatically suspended 30 days after their initial conviction.
The state has collected more than $672 million, but none of it has gone to highways. And just a fraction has gone to trauma centers, said Shapleigh, who noted that the original push for the program came during the state’s budget crunch in 2003, when lawmakers were scrambling for new revenue sources. The money is sitting in the state Treasury. The law that created the program required that collections pass a certain threshold before money is allocated.
Drunken-driving offenses carry the biggest surcharges – $1,000 a year for three years on the first conviction and $2,000 a year when the driver’s blood-alcohol level is twice the legal limit. Driving with an invalid license or without insurance draws a $250-a-year surcharge for three years.
Critics of the program said many of those affected by the surcharges are first-time offenders, students, single parents and low-income residents faced with the choice of either complying with the law or paying for necessities such as food, rent, car repairs and medical bills.
The financial penalties are so high that they are counterproductive and provide an incentive for people not to pay, the critics contend. And the surcharges come as a surprise; there’s been little effort by the state to inform the public that the program exists. Police typically don’t mention them upon issuing a ticket, and drivers are notified, often months later, in a letter from the state.
Hard to imagine a program more efficiently designed to fail than this one. Note that none of what’s written here is really new – we’ve known since at least 2007 that all this has done is create more fugitives and scofflaws. As of that time, the unpaid amount was $620 million, so you can’t even say that the rate of growth has slowed. It’s instructive to compare the Driver Responsibility Program, which was billed from the beginning as a revenue enhancement for the state – note State Sen. Steve Ogden’s lamentation in that last link about how those who haven’t paid the fines are costing the rest of us more in taxes – to red light camera fines, which are both much smaller in amount and constitute the entire sanction, while DRP charges are add-ons to an original citation. I’ll say again, I wonder why the Michael Kuboshes of the world haven’t raised a fuss about them. You can draw your own conclusions, I guess. Grits has more.