Amnesty on Unpaid Tickets Begins Feb. 1

Drivers who have dodged paying their traffic tickets will get a reprieve starting Feb. 1, when a three-month amnesty program for delinquent citations goes into effect.

Under the program, motorists who voluntarily offer to ante up at a municipal courthouse will have a chance to clear their records by paying only 70% of the total amount owed on overdue tickets.

Even with the discount, however, coming clean in traffic court won’t be cheap, officials said.

“Let’s say you had a ticket for . . . rolling a stop sign,” South Bay Municipal Court Administrator Chris Crawford said. “If that has gone to warrant, it’s $259.50 that you owe. The discounted rate would be $182 under amnesty. But at least you wouldn’t be riding around with a warrant on you anymore.”

Under the state legislation creating the amnesty program, only citations issued before April 1, 1991, will be eligible. Parking tickets, as well as citations issued for reckless driving and driving under the influence, are not covered by the program.

Drivers must go to court between Feb. 1 and April 30 to get the discount and they must pay the tickets with cash, a money order or cashier’s check.

With more than 1 million citations eligible for amnesty in Los Angeles County alone, officials are bracing for an onslaught.

During the final week of a similar program in 1974, thousands of people inundated local courthouses, disrupting regular court services and forcing officials to extend the program for two weeks, Crawford said.

“Granted, that was a better bargain, because the warrant was forgiven and all you had to pay was the original ticket, but this one will probably bring them in too,” Crawford said.

Although tickets can be paid both at the South Bay Municipal Court in Torrance and a satellite court at the base of Torrance Boulevard on the Redondo Beach Pier, Crawford may be forced to rent nearby office space to handle the demand or “pitch a tent,” he said. “Really, we’re considering that.”

He is not sure, however, how the court system would pay for the extra space.

Because the amnesty program was created specifically to help balance the state budget, 98% of the estimated $60 million to be collected statewide will go to state--not county--coffers.

Normally, proceeds from traffic tickets are divided in roughly equal parts between the issuing city, the county and the state.

“Locally, we’ll have nothing to show for it, except a warm feeling that we’ve had a substantial impact on solving the state budget crisis,” Crawford said.

City officials said that they are not familiar with the plan but that they are not surprised that the state will be taking all the money.

“We think it’s a rotten idea, but it’s typical of the state,” said Norm Cravens, assistant city manager in Inglewood, where an aggressive program to collect delinquent parking fines is under way.

“Generally, when they try to solve their budget problems at the state level, they first go after the cities to see what they can get from us,” Cravens said. “We’re always a little nervous when they’re in session.”

Many city officials said they are not too concerned about the financial impact of the amnesty program because motorists with delinquent tickets would not be likely to pay them without such an incentive anyway.

“It would be nice to get people to come forward,” said Lt. Steve Murdoch of the Redondo Beach Police Department. “But we don’t do enforcement based on revenue. We do enforcement to prevent traffic collisions. That’s our main concern.”