By Aubrey Weaver | Community News Service

Senate legislators are considering a bill that would end a policy that suspends driver’s licenses as a result of not paying civil traffic violations within 30 days.

The bill, H.53, would also dissolve the need to pay the $80 license reinstatement fee currently in place for individuals who had theirs revoked for nonpayment of a violation.

“This change would reduce one of the barriers to license reinstatement for folks,” said Willa Farrell, court diversion and pretrial services director with the attorney general’s office, to the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 30. “I think it is important to align suspensions with behavior, not with the ability to pay.”

Farrell was referring to the fact that the bill only applies to civil violations, not criminal ones. Individuals who have their license revoked as a result of DUI or negligent operation charge are not covered by the bill and will still have to go through the process of license reinstatement for their cases.

The bill has already passed the House and rests in the Senate for approval before the end of the legislative session in early May. It looks to be progressing: The Senate calendar for April 4 says it was approved by the committee with a minor requested amendment. The committee wants to add language to specify that if you have a ticket prior to the effective date of the bill, but not a suspension, you won’t have your license suspended for nonpayment. If you have a suspension prior to the effective date, the bill does not wipe that clean.

The motivation for the policy change is to address economic inequality in individuals’ ability to pay back parking and other minor tickets.

“This deals with a problem we have seen for years,” said Marshall Pahl, deputy defender general and chief juvenile defender from the defender general’s office, in the same committee meeting. “Which is that when people get moving violations or traffic tickets that can lead to license suspensions for failure to pay, those clients of ours often aren’t able to pay and they end up getting hit with the criminal charge.”

That point was echoed throughout the committee meeting last week by senators and witnesses. “It can be counterproductive to suspend a license due solely for failure to pay when that is interfering with somebody’s ability to earn the income they need to pay,” said Chris Rupe, senior fiscal analyst from the Vermont Legislative Joint Fiscal Office.

Added Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham: “That loop has never made any sense to me, so I think this is a good bill.”

But the bill isn’t trying to let people circumvent the responsibility of paying tickets they can afford. “No provision of H.53 would make a violator, for lack of a better word, off the hook for paying the amounts due for their traffic violation or any other penalties,” Rupe said.

Pahl added that for “someone whose refusal to pay is not their inability to pay, but simply that they feel like the laws don’t apply to them and they don’t want to obey the court order, there is a civil contempt division to address them.”

Pahl called the bill “all win and no lose.” Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden-Central, remarked that that “rarely happens” and Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, reminded Pahl of the anticipated $200,000 per year in lost revenue to the state’s transportation fund as a result of the change as outlined by the Joint Fiscal Office.

The anticipated loss in revenue comes from eliminating the collection of $80 license reinstatement fees for ticket nonpayment.

Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles Michael Smith told the committee the department is “neutral” on the bill and asked the committee to change the date the policy would be enacted to 30 days after passage to allow the department and the Vermont Judiciary to let people know about the policy changes and handle other housekeeping.

Rupe, the fiscal analyst, said the department and the courts might alleviate some processing costs and energy by not having to mail notices of suspension to people with unpaid fines to make up for some of the lost revenue.

The committee hearing ended quickly with no witnesses appearing against the policy. Sears mentioned that he does “worry that there is nothing we can do about out-of-state suspensions, which typically becomes an issue for those who live on the border of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York. When there’s a suspension there we honor that suspension.”

But, he acknowledged, “there’s little we can do about that.”

The Community News Service is part of the Reporting and Documentary Storytelling Program at the University of Vermont.