After fourteen years, the Driver Responsibility Program continues to vex the Texas Legislature, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The program was approved in the 'recession session' of 2003, as a way to raise badly needed money for hospital trauma centers, without having to raise taxes or otherwise starve other programs at a time when the state's budget was very tight.
The program imposes fees, sometimes up to $1,000, in addition to the fines, for motorists who are pulled over on the highway for certain offenses.
The problem that the upper middle class lawyers and business owners who make up the Legislature didn't realize is that many people can't afford to pay the extra fees. The DPS says since the program began in 2003, about 1.4 million of the 3.1 million drivers who have been snagged by the program have not paid their fees.
And Sen. Bob Hall (R-Jacksonville), who heads the Senate Transportation Committee, says the punishment for not paying the fee is not getting your driver's license renewed.
"Currently the problem we have is that we have a lot of drivers without a drivers license, and without a drivers license they can't get insurance," Hall said.And that leaves the drivers with two options.
One, according to Sen. Borris Miles (D-Houston) is that they don't drive, which means they stop being taxpaying citizens and become welfare recipients.
"If they don't have a drivers license, that means, most times, they can't get a job," he said. "They can't get an apartment, they can't get a place to stay. Then they come back to the state, and they become a responsibility of ours."
The other option, according to Edna Stoudt, who, as a Justice of the Peace in Williamson County, deals with many Driver Responsiblity Program debtors on a regular basis, is to drive anyway, without insurance, and risking another cascade of fines and fees, which they can't pay.
"I have individuals, single moms, elderly people, dads, all across the board, that have fines and fees that they can't even come up with," she said. "They aren't ever going to see their drivers license again. And when they go out there and drive, which is what they've been doing, they get another fine, they get more fees, they get another two years' suspension."
The problem...the money raised through the program, which has amounted to more than $2 billion since 2003, is the life blood of the hospital trauma system, and no lawmaker wants to take money away from trauma programs.
A measure that would have reformed the Driver Responsiblity Program was left pending in a State Senate committee...for the sixth time.
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