Satellite Court Seen as the Ticket to Better Service and Revenue

All anyone in the line wanted was information about how to handle a traffic ticket.

Unfortunately, the queue was long, 17 people long. It was already snaking out into the hall one morning last week behind the sign that said “Traffic Information” at the San Diego Municipal Court’s Kearny Mesa traffic division. So the grumbling was in high gear.

“I took a day off work to come down here,” said John Cefalu, 27, a fisherman. “I could be working and making money. But I’m standing here, losing money.”

Dave Eisenberg, 43, a Mission Hills engineer, was timing his wait on a stopwatch. After 32 minutes, he made it to the front of the line, where the clerks told him to go wait in another line. As the watch ticked away toward 60 minutes, he said, “I’m starting to get frustrated.”

Beth Boyar, 21, of Del Mar, said her 45 minutes in line had convinced her there had to be a better way. “I’d rework the whole damn thing,” she said.

The court, it turns out, plans to do exactly that.

Prompted by complaints and customer surveys--and, of course, by the allure of recovering more money by handling more cases--the court hopes in the next few months to set up a new satellite office to handle routine traffic tickets--those for speeding, red lights or other minor offenses that involve only a fine, not jail time.

The plan calls for the court to mail the satellite site’s phone number to traffic offenders as soon as it receives information about tickets from police--and for most business to be conducted without the hassle of actually going to court, said D. Kent Pedersen, San Diego Municipal Court administrator.

Currently, it’s virtually impossible to call the court’s traffic division and get anything but a recorded message. Primarily, that’s why the lines are so long at the Kearny Mesa facility, the first stop for anyone who gets a ticket in the court’s boundaries and who doesn’t mail in a sign-up for traffic school or a bail payment.

Essentially, the court handles tickets from San Diego and Poway. Tickets from other areas of the county go to either the North County, South Bay or El Cajon municipal courts, where the same kind of satellite office is not under consideration.

But, under the proposal, according to Judge E. Mac Amos, the court’s presiding judge, the three or four clerks who would work at the new site would handle inquiries, record the payment of fines by credit card and sign people up for traffic school--all over the phone.

They would, of course, also serve people who felt the need to stop by, he said.

Since the satellite would not be in the business of conducting trials, there would be no judges or bailiffs around. Instead, the clerks would be freed to help people dispose of cases before they ever get to trial, or to set trial dates for people who want to tell a judge their side of the story, Amos said.

The plan also calls for the new facility to have expanded hours, even on Saturdays, Pedersen said. And the clerks are due to be trained in customer relations, so that they view traffic offenders as “customers, not as adversaries,” Pedersen said.

The goal, Amos said, is to cut the average wait in dealing with the court on a traffic ticket, which a recent survey revealed was 33 minutes at the Kearny Mesa facility, to five minutes--either in person or on the phone.

Details of the plan, based on a similar program already in place in Los Angeles, have all been worked out, Amos said, except for one--where to put the office. The court needs to find a site.

Last week, Amos sent a letter to county and city officials detailing his plan and asking if they knew of any possible sites. If a location can be found within the next few weeks, the satellite could be launched and running by the end of the year, Amos said.

In an era of tight court budgets, the idea for a satellite office has significant appeal, since making it easier for people to take care of their tickets should produce more revenue, Pedersen said.

The satellite has the possibility of producing hundreds of thousands of dollars more annually because of the immense volume of tickets that goes through the court each year, Pedersen said. He said he had not calculated precisely how much more revenue could be generated.

He said that last year, the court handled 266,656 tickets. Of that figure, only 35,704, or 13%, were misdemeanors, such as drunk driving, that hold the possibility of jail time.

The remainder, 230,952, or 87%, involved an infraction, the less-serious offense that carries only a fine. That is the kind of ticket the satellite office would be designed to handle, Pedersen said.

Even given the possibility of added revenue, both Amos and Pedersen insisted that the primary motivation for a satellite office is a concept that they conceded too often seems alien to municipal bureaucracies--public service.

Each day the Kearny Mesa facility deals with about 500 people, Amos said in his letter. That gives the court “the opportunity to shape the public’s impression of our judicial system specifically, as well as the responsiveness of local government in general.”

In an interview, Amos said, “Now, of course, we’ve got long lines at the present traffic facility and our survey shows we’ve got a lot of citizens unhappy with standing in line, so when they get to front of that line that unhappiness often expresses itself in frustration. If we can set this satellite office up, we’d be in a better position to serve the public.”

The survey that Amos mentioned was conducted in July at the Kearny Mesa facility, Pedersen said.

Of the 383 people who took part, 96, or 25%, waited more than 40 minutes, Pedersen said. The 10% who waited the longest were in line for 70 minutes, Amos said.

The survey also revealed that the court’s current business hours, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., are convenient for only 51% of the people. A “large number” indicated that “readier access” to information “would be appreciated,” Amos said in the letter.

When the survey asked for suggestions for improvement, the clear recommendation was that “something be done about the wait time,” Amos said.

Looking for inspiration, Pedersen and Amos turned north, where the Los Angeles Municipal Court opened its first satellite three years ago. Now the Los Angeles court has three satellites, one in a city office in Westchester, another in a Baldwin Hills shopping center and the third in the San Fernando Valley.

“They’ve all made dramatic reductions in waiting times and the way people are handled in our other offices,” said Fritz Ohlrich, assistant administrator of the Los Angeles court. “They’ve been a real help to us.”

Pedersen, Amos and others from the San Diego court recently toured the Los Angeles satellites.

There, because of the satellites, the number of people who come to court for a ticket has been cut by half, Amos said. The wait time at the satellites for those who do come in has been cut from about 30 minutes to 5 minutes, he said.

Not only have the satellites improved public relations, the stress level for the court clerks has been reduced, he said.

One of the key elements of the plan in Los Angeles is the way the clerks interact with the public, Amos said.

“They’re referred to as customers,” he said. “That’s the way they do it in L.A. Most of these people are just citizens who picked up a traffic ticket. They’re not criminals.”

All 260 San Diego Municipal Court clerks, not just the three or four who may work at the satellite, are now due to receive “customer service training” from a consultant, Pedersen said.

The Baldwin Hills office is open extended hours, much like the other stores in the shopping center, Ohlrich said.

The San Diego office is expected to open for business at 10 a.m. and close at 6 p.m., Amos said. The survey indicated that those hours would accommodate the most people, since people will be able to transact business after normal working hours.

The plan also calls for the San Diego satellite to be open from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, Amos said.

Outside of rent, start-up costs for the satellite would be minimal, Amos said, since it would be staffed by existing clerks. Some overtime would be required, he said. Precise figures were not available.

As for rent, Amos said he hoped to pick up space for free or for a nominal rent, say, $1. In Los Angeles, for instance, the Westchester office pays only nominal rent, since it is in a city building, Ohlrich said. On the other hand, he said, the Baldwin Hills location pays the shopping center’s going rate.

Amos said the court had no leads yet for a location.

But he said in the letter that another study found that the greatest number of traffic offenders live in the College area near San Diego State University, around the Sports Arena and in Hillcrest.

The July survey found that people were much more likely to visit a satellite office if it was close to home, Amos said. So those three areas are the most promising, he said.

Pedersen added that those three areas are also important because they provide easy freeway access and a variety of shopping center locations. “We’re looking for something that is in a population center, that does a lot of business with us, that has good access and that has good parking available,” he said.

“But we think we will be a magnet, no matter where we are located,” he said.

No matter where the satellite may be located, should it ever get off the ground, the idea of a five-minute wait seemed especially appealing to the line waiters at Kearny Mesa. “Anything, so we don’t have 15 people waiting in line,” said Boyar, the 21-year-old from Del Mar.

“Five minutes would be a lot, lot, lot better,” said Dennis Espiritu, 19, of San Diego.

But there was also a weary skepticism of bureaucratic reforms.

“Five minutes?” said Eisenberg, as his stopwatch kept ticking toward 60 minutes. “The fast food places can’t do it. How can they do it?”