Abolition of driver surcharges a rare #cjreform upside for 2019 #txlege

In a Texas legislative session where scarce little justice-reform legislation of any stripe made it through the process, the abolition of the hated Driver-Responsibility surcharge will be remembered as the signature accomplishment. The bill getting rid of the program has finally passed and HB 2048 is headed to the governor.

From advocates' perspective, there wasn't a ton left to do. In 2017, a proposal to replace trauma-center funding generated by the surcharges with a nearly identical system of new "fines" died in the Senate. At the time, advocates promoted a number of much more reasonable funding solutions, and once it became clear that the most-regressive-possible surcharge repeal did not have a path, legislative leaders resigned themselves to looking at those suggestions.

With Senate Finance Chair Jane Nelson's blessing, Sen. Joan Huffman filed legislation in the senate, with Appropriations Chairman Dr. John Zerwas filing a companion bill in the House, which dropped the traffic-fine increase to $20, tacked a new $2 fee on insurance policies, and jiggled the ratios around regarding who got what to make the hospitals whole.

The bill abolished surcharges for everyone but DWI offenders. They receive 12 percent of all surcharges, so 88 percent of surcharges will be eliminated going forward.

For everyone owing surcharges at the time the bill becomes law on September 1, 2019, the debt will be nullified along with the program. That will allow 1.5 million people whose licenses currently are suspended over nonpayment of surcharges to get their licenses back.

Some of these folks have gone without licenses for more than a decade because they couldn't pay, with surcharges compounding because they drove with revoked licenses. Since 2003, about 3 million people have racked up 16 million surcharges, with half of them losing their licenses permanently, until this bill.

For DWI offenders, the old "surcharges" were kept on the books and renamed criminal fines, tacked on in addition to other punishments already on the books for the offense. But in contrast to "civil" surcharges, judges can waive criminal fines for indigent people. Plus, Emily Gerrick of the Texas Fair Defense Project convinced the senate to add a provision creating a presumptive indigence provision for these fines similar to that for surcharges. And with those perfecting amendments, the bill passed the senate.

This is a moment your correspondent has been working toward for more than a decade. Long-time readers will recall Grits worked with Alison Brock at Rep. Sylvester Turner's office, to create amnesty/indigence provisions for the surcharge, and with Mandy Marzullo, now my podcast co-host at Reasonably Suspicious, to implement the rules at DPS. Hating on the program has been a pet project of mine nearly since the inception of this blog.

The surcharges were created in 2003, and by 2007, people driving with licenses suspended under the program had become a chronic problem. That year, the Legislature changed DWLI on the first offense from a Class B to a Class C misdemeanor because unlicensed surcharge-owing drivers were filling up local jails. They also added DWLI to a list of offenses, the most prominent of which was pot possession, for which police could give citations instead of arresting people. That temporarily stemmed jail overcrowding pressures, though today, in some counties, Class B DWLIs still account for large percentages of the misdemeanor docket.

Indeed, during the worst of it, before indigence provisions kicked in, judges told the Legislature they were sentencing DWI cases as reckless driving or obstruction of a roadway to avoid defendants racking up surcharges that everyone knew they couldn't pay.

So these surcharges have driven misdemeanor-justice policies in Texas in unexpected, weird, and mostly negative, regressive ways for many years now. It's an incredible relief that they're about to go away.

The Texas Legislature may not accomplish much in 2019 on justice reform. But this will help so many people, the one victory nearly outweighs the (heart breaking) losses.