A new law in California effectively forgave a roughly $50 million sum of San Francisco’s traffic fine debts and is slated to forgive yet another $500 million in debt statewide.
The forgiven $50 million went out to roughly 180,000 traffic tickets, as reported by a recent press release from the Treasurer’s Office of San Francisco. The director for the treasurer’s Financial Justice Project and one of the main instigators of the legislation, Anne Stuhldreher, asserted that the local courts should not attempt to fund themselves solely from the fees that they choose to impose on the populace.
“California should not fund our local courts by asking the courts to impose fees that they benefit from. Courts should be funded separate and apart from these fees,” expressed Stuhldreher. “Eliminating the debt from this unfair and unnecessary fee and lowering it is a commonsense reform and an important step forward.”
The Financial Justice Project was officially established by the San Francisco Treasurer’s Office in order to discover and alter fines and fees that adversely or disproportionately hurt low-income or minority individuals.
Titled Assembly Bill 199, the new law is part of the budget bill for the state and eliminated all fees issued prior to the first of July and made use of $10 million in backfill to the courts. It also cut down the civil assessment fee, or late fee, from a massive $300 down to $100. Those late fees will not end up going to a general fund for California instead of directly to the local court.
The bill also expanded the eligibility for the automatic filing fee waivers to those within a range of 200 percent of the standard federal poverty guidances, those taking part in the supplemental nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) of the state, and those currently being issued unemployment compensation.
As stated by one of the assembly members that brought the new bill to light, Phil Tang (D-San Francisco), the main point of the bill is to create equity. He guessed that the late fees were forcibly removing over $100 million, which he claimed disproportionately hurt lower-income families, as claimed in an interview with ABC7 News.
“Unfortunately for too long, our courts have been relying on low-income individuals paying civil assessments to fund many of their operations,” explained Ting.
Despite all the planning, legislators from the state of California were not the ones to create the idea for this new bill.
The Debt Free Justice California (DFJC), an alliance of activist groups, called on Governor Gavin Newsom and the California Assembly to push through the new bill. DFJC members include the ACLUs of Southern and Northern California, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, PolicyLink, and San Francisco’s Financial Justice Project.
This massive debt forgiveness legislation was largely designed in the wake of a March report written by DFJC and the the San Francisco treasurer’s Financial Justice Project making the claim that late fees, or civil assessments, were a “poverty penalty, that quite unfairly hindered “Black and brown people.”
However, members of DFJC made the claim that this new law did not go quite far enough. One representative of one of the coalition’s member organizations, Rio Scharf, made the claim as part of a press release in June that the state was just perpetuating poverty and racism by not removing the fees in their entirety.
“Governor Newsom had the opportunity to eliminate this racist and regressive fee and didn’t step up,” stated Scharf. “The continuation of civil assessments will burden many more Californians and undermine the very financial relief the governor seeks to deliver through this year’s budget.”
📺What are civil assessments? They are a hidden $300 fee charged to people who already cannot afford to pay a ticket. @CAgovernor @GavinNewsom let's fully end the civil assessment! pic.twitter.com/EVAJ0BgaXt https://t.co/7ASgPJ2CJ7
— Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Bay Area (@lccrsf) June 16, 2022
