Local ticket standoff cools

By Mark Fischenich
The Free Press

March 20, 2009 09:20 am

— Minnesotans seeing the flashing lights of a squad car may be in store for more $60 administrative penalties rather than warnings or state fines more than double that amount.
The multi-year standoff at the Capitol over whether cities can establish their own system for imposing traffic fines — and keeping the proceeds rather than sending much of the money to the state — appears to be over.
“I don’t think we have any real opposition,” said Rep. Tony Cornish, the Lake Crystal police chief who has long opposed locally imposed fines but helped hammer out a compromise with advocates of the idea. “So it should go.”
The compromise bill was forged late Wednesday and unanimously passed a key House committee Thursday. The bill will, for the first time, specifically allow cities to impose local administrative penalties for certain traffic offenses.
If the legislation continues to progress and becomes law, cities such as Waseca and Mapleton won’t have to worry any longer that they’re breaking the law by imposing local fines and keeping all the revenue. And many other cities would likely adopt the practice in the near future if its legality is clarified.
“Knowing it’s legal, I think there will be more people doing it,” said Cornish, R-Good Thunder.
The League of Minnesota Cities and associations of police chiefs and sheriffs support administrative fees for two reasons. It keeps the resulting revenue in local coffers and it gives officers a mid-range penalty for traffic violations rather than having to choose between the extremes of a warning and a state fine that costs well over $100 and is reported to insurance companies.
Those groups all signed off on the negotiated deal. So did the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, which had long opposed local administrative penalties.
None of them are particularly pleased, however.
“Isn’t that the making of a true compromise, that everybody has to plug their nose a little bit?” said Anne Finn, a lobbyist for the League of Minnesota Cities.
In exchange for making the local fines officially legal, opponents managed to limit the number of traffic offenses where the local fines can be imposed.
City police, sheriffs’ deputies and state troopers can give violators the option of taking the local administrative penalty — which is about $75 less than a typical state fine when surcharges are added — for equipment violations, speeding at less than 10 mph over the limit, failing to yield the right of way and failing to stop at a stop sign, Cornish said.
The size of the local fine was locked in at $60, rather than giving cities and counties the latitude to set the fine level. And Minnesota will now take a third of that local fine for the state general fund, along with requiring that half of the remaining $40 be used exclusively for law enforcement activities of the city or county imposing the fine.
For cities now issuing administrative penalties without those sort of state-imposed restrictions, the legislation might be unwelcome, Finn said.
“I fully expect there will be some cities that are disappointed with the compromise,” she said. “But I think the alternative would have been a bill to prohibit all administrative fines for traffic (offenses), and we would have been left with nothing.”
Cornish isn’t happy either.
“I’m still not in favor,” he said. “It’s one of those compromises you don’t especially like.”
But it does address his concern that the current system creates a hodge-podge of rules from one jurisdiction to the next. It also prevents all of the revenue from administrative penalties from being diverted from the state.
While the compromise was worked out in the House, Cornish and Finn expect the Senate to agree that it’s an appropriate way to end an impasse that has been in place for three or four years — especially since all of the interested groups have reluctantly agreed to support it.