09.02 - Administrative Fines - Laserfiche WebLink

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are driving less than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, you may have been given a \.. warning. Law enforcement already has discretion on ticketing. The upside for the city in giving out administrative penalties is that they do not have to split the money with the state. The upside for the drivers, or so it seems, is that the cost of the ticket is less than the uniform ticket and it does not get reported to their insurance company. A win-win situation? If you think it's too good to be true, you're right. Where drivers would have gotten warnings before, they must now pay the city. Being stopped by an officer and given a warning certainly has its own deterrent effect, even if there is no fine, penalty, record, or report to an insurance company. With administrative penalties, citizens pay the city to keep out of court, keep the stop off their record, and not have it reported to an insurance company. A driver's only recourse is to appeal to the city administrator or city council, hardly impartial since they get to keep 100 percent of the proceeds of a local ticket. It is obvious that this sort of arrangement creates an incentive to catch more of these types of speeders because of the increased revenue for the local municipality. While some local officials are changing their tune now, many were quoted earlier this year saying they were using these administrative penalties as a way to raise revenue. For years they had no public safety concerns that their officers were stopping drivers and giving only warnings. From a public safety perspective, fines for speeding should be for deterring speeding, not for the express purpose of raising revenue. It puts law enforcement in the uncomfortable position of being perceived by the public as having a ticket or revenue quota in order to fund their positions. This also illegal in Minnesota. The bottom line is this - if a citizen deserves a ticket based on speeding, officers should issue one. The citizen can challenge that ticket through the court system before a fair and impartial decision maker, rather than through an unauthorized city-run system. If the legislature wants to set up a different system, it can. Individual cities, however, cannot. Further, no unit of government should use a public safety enforcement tool, such as speeding tickets, as a revenue stream. The Attorney General's Office issued an opinion on this very issue stating cities had no authority to implement these ordinances. In that opinion it states: "Given the extent and detail of legislation addressing statutory criminal offenses and prosecution procedures set forth in MN Statutes Chapters 169 and 609 through 634, it is clear that the state has preempted the field with respect to the offenses and procedures defined in those statutes. Consequently, while cities are empowered to regulate conduct in areas of local interest and to supplement statutory regulation in many area, cf.,Hannah v. City of Minneapolis, 623 N.W. 2d 281 (Minn. Ct. App. 2001), they may not, in our view, redefine the nature or level of criminal offense as specified by statute or modify statutory procedures for enforcement or penalties for an offense."