North County Court Hires Agency to Collect Fines : Justice: Collectors will garnish wages and dip into bank accounts to obtain payment from offenders.

Faced with an estimated $8 million in outstanding misdemeanor fines, North County’s Municipal Court is hiring an agency to collect from offenders who fail to pay their fines.

Starting Jan. 4, the collection agency empowered to garnish wages and sap bank accounts will root out violators whose court fines have been delinquent more than 60 days.

The Vista court assesses about $29 million in misdemeanor fines a year, said Patricia Johns, court administrator, but $8 million to $9 million goes unpaid because the money-strapped county cannot afford to hire the staff to collect it.

Repeated letters threatening to withhold offenders’ driver’s licenses and auto registrations don’t seem to work, Johns said. Even threatening people with jail time has weak results; some warrants go unpaid for as long as seven years.

But the new system, the only one of its kind in the county, will make it harder to hide from the law. Before offenders are released, they must provide credit card, bank account and Social Security numbers to help the collection agency tap into their finances should they break their promise to pay.

Johns expects the collection rate to rise from 50% to 75%--an increase that translates into about $4 million--during the first year of using the collection agency, Houston-based GC Services.

If the first year goes well, the program will be expanded to other county courts, which together have 50,000 in unpaid fines worth about $20 million, said Charles Nares, a county staff officer. One of the first likely targets is the traffic court in San Marcos, where fines average $110 per violation.

“Maybe people aren’t paying because they don’t feel there’s a consequence or punishment for not paying. In the past, there hasn’t been,” Nares said. “I think you’ll see a change in that.”

Drunk drivers make up the bulk of the court’s roughly 10,000 people with outstanding fines, court officials said, followed by drug offenders, shoplifters, spouse abusers and a mixture of others. The average fine for drunk driving is about $1,700.

Before hiring the collection agency, the county conducted a 90-day pilot project in early 1991 to gauge its success. The project resulted in a slight increase in collections, enough to convince county officials that a longer period would mean even higher collections.

Officials also examined results in several Los Angeles-area courts that recently hired collection agencies, including Huntington Park, Pomona, Whittier and Cerritos.

Over a five-month period, studies showed, agencies collected 7% to 30% of the fines that were delinquent by at least five months.

Payment for GC Services comes from the people being fined. The agency will tack $170 onto each fine, the lowest fee of several agencies that competed for the county contract in November. State law allows an assessment of up to $250 to be tacked on for collecting criminal fines.

Nares said the new collection zeal is not an attempt to help right San Diego County’s financial woes. Of the fines collected, Nares said, only about 3% goes into the county’s general fund.

Of the rest, 53% goes to the state, about 12% to cities, and 30% to 35% into special accounts for repairing roads and other public projects.