Virginia's Exorbitant New Abuser Fees: Happy Motoring!

Starting on Sunday, if a jerk from Maryland or the District drives recklessly in Virginia, he'll be liable for a $100 fine. But if the jerky driver is a Virginian, he'll get slapped with an extra $1,050 fine on top of the $100. Similarly, if an out of state drunk gets caught on a Virginia road, he'll face a $250 fine if this is his first DUI. But a Virginian caught in the same act will have to pay the $250 plus a bonus fee of $2,250.

Needless to say, this innovation in soaking roadway miscreants is not going over especially well in the Old Dominion.
There's a great uproar about the supposed unfairness of hitting Virginians with giant fees that out of state drivers don't have to worry about. There's a wave of grumbling about how this new fee structure came to pass, with a special focus on the role of the lawyer/politicians who stand to gain big money from this novel way of raising tax dollars.
There's a big bonanza of fees awaiting those law firms around the state that are selected to go chase after the highway miscreants who don't pay their fines in a timely way. Let's take a look at some of the discomfiting effects of this new law. State attorney general Bob McDonnell, who wants to be your next governor, used to work at the firm of Huff, Poole & Mahoney in Virginia Beach, which has an exclusive contract with local prosecutors' offices to go out and collect those unpaid fines. The firm, according to the Virginian-Pilot, earned more than $2 million in collection fees last year. McDonnell, as his staff was quick to remind me this morning, does not give out those contracts and has no financial connection to his old firm. But still, it doesn't exactly breed confidence in the system when lawyers who go on to work for the people of Virginia appear to be in the position of creating law that could help their old friends.
Closer to home, it's northern Virginia Delegate David Albo who's getting slammed as the creator of this new fee structure. It turns out that the Fairfax delegate is, in his off hours from his legislative work, a lawyer at a firm that handles a lot of traffic matters. That, his critics say, puts Albo in a position to profit handsomely from the new fees.
Albo himself defends the abuser fees as a good way to raise state money for transportation improvements--goodness knows we wouldn't want to raise taxes in an open and fair manner--and as a fair tool to wield against the jerks who make driving more dangerous than it ought to be.
"My job as a delegate is to make people slow down and build some roads," Albo told the Post's Tom Jackman. "This bill does both.... It's basically a voluntary tax. If you don't commit a crime on the streets, or run up a huge amount of points, you don't pay anything. We believe its main effect will be to get people to stop driving like maniacs."
This is a bipartisan load: Gov. Tim Kaine said pretty much the same thing yesterday. "I don't have the ability to give driving instructions to 7 1/2 million Virginians, but hopefully the prospect of stiff fines will make people drive right," the guv told WTOP radio.
Ok--I agree with the new law's critics that there's something distasteful and even unfair about smacking the state's own residents with these fees while letting out of state drivers carry on as usual. And I think it's essentially dishonest to rely on sneaky fees like this to raise the money that should be raised with a straightforward tax increase, in this case, by hiking the gas tax.
But Albo is correct about one very important part of this initiative: Confiscatory fees do have a good social impact. In New Jersey, where similar fees have been on the books since 1983 (though they are imposed on all offenders, no matter whether they live in Jersey), drivers have become more careful--the number of points they've accrued has dropped since the fees were imposed. And in European countries, insanely high fines have helped to reduce drunk driving & DUI / DWI.