Local courts are working hard to collect outstanding fines in Grey and Bruce Counties.
Provincial Offences Court Manager Amanda Kokas made a presentation to Bruce County Council this week.
The original purpose of the presentation was to talk about how local courts were faring with keeping up with court dates since the pandemic.
One project that the courts are currently working on is collecting fines for various offences, but it’s been a lot of work to get people to pay because they don’t have a dedicated collections department.
Kokas says that they’re hoping the province will provide more resources, saying”We need more collection efforts. A lot of these fines are pre-transfer, so they’re from the 1980s and 1990s. Over $3 million is from there.”
She says that although things like speeding tickets and traffic offences prevented those who owe from renewing their driver’s licence, they wanted to advocate to the province to expand that restriction to any outstanding balance to make sure that those charges are paid.
“So if they do get a speeding ticket, they can’t pay that, which could suspend their driver’s licence, if they don’t pay all their old tickets first.”
Currently, legislation prevents people who owe for traffic-related offences from renewing their licence, but can still have other fines that have no effect.
Kokas says that because people pay little attention to those fines, they simply sit in arrears and don’t get paid. And while those fines my be sent to the third-party collections agency that the courts use, the charges don’t get settled and the most they do is affect the debtor’s credit score.
“It is difficult the longer the fines sit to wait for them to get paid, and most of them are what we call defaulted fines. So they’re liquor licence fines, they’re fines that don’t affect their driving licence. One of the things that we are proposing is to the province is that you have to pay your oldest fine first.”
She says that local courts were recently able to clear fines owed by people who had passed away, thereby clearing $1.3 million in fines from the books.
