1 Million Unpaid Traffic Tickets in County Could Be Eligible For Partial Amnesty Under State Program

Photo by Atwater Village Newbie via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr

If you have traffic tickets that you haven't paid since 2008, the state wants to help you wipe the slate clean. Starting in 2012, the state will be offering you a 50 percent discount to pay off tickets that were supposed to be paid off in 2009, according to the Daily Breeze.

The state is handing out the steep discount in the hopes of getting something rather than nothing from delinquent traffic tickets that are way, way overdue. Up to 1 million tickets could be eligible for the program in Los Angeles County alone, the paper reports

Traffic tickets — not including parking tickets — that were supposed to be paid by January 1, 2009 are eligible. Scofflaws will have from January 1 until June 30, 2012 to pay off the old tickets.

"If you have a past-due ticket that has not been paid, now would be the time to pay it off and save 50 percent," said Philip Carrizosa, spokesman for the Administrative Office of the Courts told the paper.

It's not clear how much the state expects to get, but the state has launched similar programs in the past. In 2004, it launched a campaign to recoup unpaid state income taxes from 1,138 taxpayers. That program recouped $1.3 billion, according to the Franchise Tax Board.

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By Emma G. Gallegos in News on October 9, 2011 2:45 PM 0 Comments

Comments [rss]

Travis Kim

Why is there a photo of parking ticket when this article is about traffic citations only?

Eagle_Rock_Tom

Why don't they do the same for parking tickets?? Or better yet, why don't they stop writing parking tickets? The reality is that until Proposition 13 passed, cities did not require businesses to provide adequate, off-street parking. The reason: they got property taxes for improvements (read that: structures) on land; not for land that merely was paved over for parking. They wanted businesses to build buildings, not parking. The Automobile Club of Southern California has been telling cities that more parking was needed, since 1915! So in essence, by only providing parking on the streets, the cities made more in property taxes. They've already been paid for that failure in planning. Now, the parking tickets are only a form of rewarding cities for bad planning---and do not serve reasonable purpose except increasing revenue. That's an unequal form of taxation!

In the City of Los Angeles, it is even worse: they have a municipal ordinance that exempts those who write parking tickets from obeying the the laws that they enforce. This, in spite of a provision in the State Constitution that says that no laws shall be passed that grants privileges to any one class of citizens that are not granted to ALL classes of citizens.

bob

Since I paid all my tickets in the last 3 years, can I get 50% back? that's umm, about $800. I'll be waiting for the check. Thank you.

3po1nt0

groupon for delinquents. LA is so desperate for revenue it's pathetic

Javier

I'm pretty sure that if it hasn't been paid since 2009, the late fees and penalties alone would make it so that even with a 50% discount, the ticket cost will still be 200% above the cost of the infraction alone.