- November 18, 2024
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City of Palm Coast attorney Robin McKinney appeared in court May 30, saying the city will stop accepting $158 fines from drivers ticketed by red-light cameras on the expectation that the clerk of court’s office would simply dismiss the drivers’ costlier Uniform Traffic Citations.
Only Clerk of Court Gail Wadsworth’s office has the legal authority to accept those drivers’ money or dismiss their case, Judge Melissa Moore Stens said during the hearing.
“The way I see it, you all don’t have the ability to collect that money once it’s already been sent as a UTC,” she said to McKinney and Palm Coast Code Enforcement Manager Barbara Grossman and code enforcement customer service representative Liliana Filipe during the hearing.
McKinney said that after the clerk’s office dismissed about 800 such cases, city staff began processing the payments before receiving notification that the cases were dismissed.
In effect, staff were telling drivers whose initial $158 notice of violation had already been converted to a $264 UTC — which happens automatically if the lower fine isn’t paid on time — that they could avoid going to court and fighting the costlier UTC if they simply paid the city $158. The city will no longer do that, McKinney said.
Wadsworth said that by accepting the $158 after a UTC had been issued, Palm Coast both usurped her authority and deprived other state agencies, like the health department, of money that they receive in disbursements from UTCs.
Palm Coast makes a flat fee from the cameras, and the city’s income isn’t affected by whether notices of violation become UTCs and whether those are dismissed. Arizona-based red-light camera company American Traffic Solutions, though, can lose its cut of citation money if a notice of violation becomes a UTC and is then dismissed.
But underlying the miscommunication between the city and the clerk’s office was a costlier one: ATS, Wadsworth said, mails out the initial $158 violation notices, and has repeatedly failed to promptly notify the city when those notices come back un-received.
If a driver doesn’t pay the $158 notice of violation because they never received it, it becomes a $264 UTC, and if that isn’t paid, the driver’s license is suspended. Some find that out the hard way.
“We had an instance of a woman picking somebody up from a military base, and she was put in jail overnight because her license had been suspended due to a D6 in Flagler County for a red-light infraction that she had never received,” Wadsworth said during the hearing.
Mailing issues have been a problem since the city’s camera program started, she said.
At first, ATS mailed out violation notices with no return address, so the company had no way of knowing if the notices were received or not. Then there was a period in which a Bunnell address listed as a payment address the violation notices was incorrect, and drivers were mailing money that was never received.
In 2011, Wadsworth said, “Judge Walsh dismissed 311 UTC’s because ATS admitted that their mailing system was malfunctioning, and the barcode dropped off of the mailing address.”
At one point, Wadsworth said, people saying they’d never received a notice of violation made up “75% of those people who came to court to contest these.”
Those mailing issues, largely a matter of communication between Palm Coast and ATS, were not resolved in any way at the May 30 hearing.
Because of the repeated problems, the clerk’s office has been mailing out courtesy notices to drivers whose violations become UTCs. Many of the notices are returned as undeliverable, and Wadsworth dismisses those UTCs — and will continue to do so, she said — because of the likelihood the driver hadn’t received any notification of an infraction.
