If you get a traffic ticket in Nashville, soon, you’ll be able to pay it here, too.
For more than two years, the town attorney and town council have been talking about how to establish procedures so that people who are ticketed would pay less in fines, and so that fine money would stay local. On Aug. 16, the council passed ordinances related to those goals.
Currently, many traffic tickets that Nashville officers write are state tickets; the town didn’t have mechanisms to assess fines or collect those fees, so most of the money has been going to the state.
The town council passed an ordinance creating an “ordinance violations bureau” and amended another ordinance to include what the violations are.
The “ordinance violations bureau” — the place where tickets are paid — will be the Nashville clerk-treasurer’s office in Town Hall.
The traffic offenses that were added were driving the wrong way on a one-way, speeding, failing to stop at a stop sign and failing to yield to pedestrians in any crosswalk. Town Attorney James T. Roberts said that Nashville’s ordinances actually didn’t list these as violations until now; however, people could still be ticketed for them under state law.
The penalty for driving the wrong way on a one-way, not stopping at a stop sign, or not yielding to a pedestrian in a crosswalk was set at $85 per violation. If that ticket isn’t paid within 15 days of the violation, it increases to $100.
For speeding, the penalty is $85 plus $10 for every 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. If that ticket isn’t paid within 15 days, it increases to $100 plus $10 for each 10 miles per hour over the speed limit.
Those fines are lower than what a person would pay with a state ticket, which could be around $150, Roberts said.
Drivers also could fight tickets in court. Those would be handled by the Brown Circuit Court judge, Roberts said last summer.
These changes became effective with the town council’s vote and after the ordinances were published; they appeared in the Aug. 22 paper.
The votes to make the changes weren’t unanimous. Town council member Arthur Omberg, a former Nashville police officer, voted against them because he’s concerned they could be abused by a future town council or future police force. He had voiced that concern several times over the past couple years when this topic was discussed.
He said he knows Brown County isn’t Ferguson, Missouri, but that city started to rely so heavily on traffic fines that it “actually caused a lot of issues in the community with the poor,” he said. “No, I don’t believe anybody in this room today would abuse that, but I think, ‘What will it be in 10 years?’ I see some ordinances I voted on 12 years ago and say, ‘What was I thinking?’”
Clerk-treasurer Brenda Young said the ticket money would go into the town’s general fund.
Roberts said that Omberg’s concern was a “valid one,” and he understands the sentiment of not wanting to see Nashville turn into a “speed trap,” but that partly can be protected by “the quality of the police that we hire.”
The number of violations and tickets written for each would be public records, he added.
The new ticketing system can’t start until all the internal mechanisms are put in place, so the exact date it would start is “a fluid thing,” said town council President “Buzz” King.
