In the absence of a more compelling political narrative during the summer doldrums, the issue of abuser fees for reckless drivers has become the issue du jour in the Mainstream Media. A half dozen newspapers, plus the Associated Press, published articles on the topic yesterday.
Down in Martinsville, the abusive driver fees have become a campaign issue. Jeff Evans, a Republican candidate for state Senate, has attacked his opponent, state Sen. Roscoe Reynolds, D-Ridgeway, for introducing a version of the law on the behalf of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. As quoted in the Martinsville Bulletin, Evans said in a press release:
“Of course [the fees] will place an undue burden on any of our low-income citizens and cause many more to simply ignore the law and place themselves in danger of serving jail time. Even worse, it applies only to Virginia residents. That is just not right.”
The same day, someone raised the out-of-state angle during the call-in radio show with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. The Governor opened the possibility of extending the abuser fees for reckless driving and Driving Under the Influence to out-of-state drivers.
The idea sounds reasonable — why should Virginians be held to a higher standard? But as Christina Nuckols with the Virginian-Pilot explains, the matter gets complicated very quickly.
The fees are currently treated as civil penalties collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles. If you don’t pay the fee, your driver’s license could be suspended. The fees would have to be changed to criminal fines in order to collect from out-of-state drivers.
Virginia’s constitution earmarks all court fines to be spent on school construction and teacher retirement benefits. The bad-driver fees were adopted to generate new money for road maintenance.
Meanwhile, House Speaker William J. Howell has responded to criticism in the Free Lance-Star: The Kaine administration, he wrote in a column, estimates that only 150,000 people, 2.5 percent of all licensed drivers, would have been affected during the past few years. Further, writes Howell:
A cursory check of the facts would have found that abuser fees have worked successfully in New Jersey, where the number of demerit points drivers have accrued for dangerous driving has fallen since that state’s fees were introduced. The direct results of Virginia’s plan will be better driving, safer roads, less traffic congestion due to accidents, and more money for transportation.
Seems to me that we should have had this debate before the law was passed. Bacon’s Rebellion raised a number of issues during the transportation debate, but in the stampede to find new revenue sources, only a handful of others questioned the law. To this day, I have yet to see an an article that quotes Virginia traffic judges for their opinions of what the law might mean. We have only begun to explore the ramifications of this issue.
