State fees on municipal court fines municipal courts in Texas collect funds on behalf of the state for a wide variety of programs. These state programs range from the Criminal Justice Planning Fund to the Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund.
In most cases, the fees are imposed on a person convicted of any criminal offense. For these collection efforts, cities are generally allowed to keep some small amount of revenue as reimbursement for the costs incurred to collect the fees and remit them to the state. Many city officials contend that state court costs adversely impact municipal courts in two ways.
First, the state’s court costs are complicated to administer. While cities can keep a small percentage of the costs as an administrative fee, that amount is not sufficient to reimburse the cities for the bookkeeping and administrative problems connected with this function.
Second, when setting an appropriate fine for an offense, a judge must consider the fact that the defendant will also be paying state court costs.
As a result, municipal fine revenue is often lower than it would otherwise be, because the judge has considered the state court costs when setting a defendant’s total fine. Municipal court clerks also point out that the state requires that, in the event of a partial payment, the state court costs must be paid first, before the city can keep any of the fine. This means that cities must do all the work collecting fines, but are not allowed to keep any money until the state court costs have been fully satisfied.
In recent years, the number and amount of the state fees collected by municipal courts have grown rapidly. For example, on a typical traffic offense conviction, a municipal court defendant must currently pay $82 in state-imposed fees before any city fine is collected.
In many ways, municipal court collection of state fees is similar to the state’s collection of municipal sales tax. In each case, one level of government is processing a tax/fee levied by another level of government, is remitting it and is keeping a fee for providing those services. While there are similarities, there are also substantial differences.
For example, the state doesn’t really “collect” the municipal sales tax. It’s collected by the merchant. With regard to state fees on municipal court fines, a municipal court employee actually collects the fees and bears the brunt of any resulting fee-payer anger.
Second, the state controls the level of the municipal sales tax, but cities don’t control the level of state fees on municipal fines. So while cities can’t unilaterally raise the city sales tax without permission from the state, the state can, and frequently does, increase the amount of state fees cities must collect and remit.
How much state fee/fine revenue do municipal courts collect annually? For fiscal year 2010, the amount was just over $235 million.
Merle Taylor is the Snyder City Manager. He may be reached at Snyder City Hall or by calling 573-4957 or by email at mtaylor@ci.snyder.tx.us.