Travis County Commissioners Court
March 27, 2007
Item 16
Due to technical difficulties some caption files may be incomplete.
16. Approve modification no.4 to contract no. Ps040272ml, gila corporation d/b/a msb, for collections of fines and fees. (justice of the peace precinct 3)
>> Commissioners, cyd grimes purchasing agent. Over the last couple of weeks you all discussed this item. And this action is to follow up and extend the current contract with gila corporation doing business as msb until 30 days after time we have a new contract in place. As leroy briefed the court last time on this issue, we are working on the r.f.p., it is probably going to take another 2 -- two months?
>> I would say no longer than four months. We will have a draft r.f.p. To the court. As you are aware, the p.b.o. We have one analyst, our system budget director out for two months on mat attorneyty leave. Maternity leave. We are working on put together the pieces of that r.f.p. Along with the j.p.'s and constables.
>> some of the other things in this modification that previously have been discussed was the -- the discussion about the daly payment of a accounts, changing the project director to the tax office, I included some reports on demographic data that we will need in our next analysis, then the return of some of the cases that are optioned upon termination of the briefly. We had touched on this before on the first page of the memorandum in order to effectively track cases that could be referred to a third party vendor the Texas office needs a new module added to the
>> [indiscernible] system. My understanding is that would need to be added whether we had a third party vendor or not; is that true.
>> that's correct. Since last week when this item was on the agenda for discussion, we have tested the electronic feed into the central collections and we have one additional adjustment and we expect that in the near future. Ance to your question, the on the first page of the draft modification to the contract, 3.4, the demographic information about defendants from whom fines and fees are collected, are we going to collect any additional information from the third party vendor regarding -- let me -- regarding the method of collection or the turn around time for the collection? I'm assuming that we will get the turn around time in any case. People will know when we reverted, when we got money from it.
>> we will get that information.
>> will we get any information about the methods used in the interim to pull that money in?
>> the vendor has always shown us, been very open about letting us know all of the methods that they use to collect and any letters, the county has to approve the letters that go out and they show us their scripts when they talk to people, those types of things, yes, they will continue sharing that information.
>> that's great. Are we memorializing that kind of relationship in the contract for the future?
>> yes, that's what we want to continue in the future to have that. Basically right now the contract is -- is open as far as how we do things internally, but then it's very specific in what we request for the contractor to do, they pretty much have to do it the way we want them to. So it's nice and firm in that area.
>> the reason why I ask, if we ever went with a different third party, they were less -- less cooperative on that issue. My last question on this is do we have the statistics on the effectiveness of omni in our collection efforts so that we can -- my point being the collection agency in order to speed up our ability, omni is slow but sure money, whereas third party collections is faster money. To be able to compare --
>> we would be able to do that, we haven't done that. It would take some time, but what we would have to do is when we first started with the omni program, it started as a pilot increasing in judge bimbry's court, we could go back and look at those cases from before we had any other kind of collection effort other than just what was happening in the offices over the constables, no centralized tax office collections, no third party it was just omni and what was already happening. We could go back and look at that and try to do some analysis on that. So I think it ran for two years.
>> we would have two years worth of cases to go back and maybe pull a random sample and do some testing on it. I think it would be good for us to do that, we are paying money to get the faster, is that really cost procedure, operations of the contract that's set up, I think you answered that yesterday I pretty much agreed with. I did continue to hammer on, I want to continue to hammer on, is that the manual type of stuff that we are doing right now, I know that we are not there yet.
>> [indiscernible] the system with the tax office, however, there needs to be an interface somewhere along the lines whereby we will be able to be automated all across the board. No one will be left out, as they have to go and try to retrieve the hard to acquire fines and fees, the collection of those fines and fees, wherever they may be. I'm looking at...
>> ...mindful that I am willing to go to this 90 day thing that we are going to allow the tax office to interface with, if that's -- if we can show that that is effective then -- then so be it. But I do want us to monitor this thing that -- that if -- if either the tax office says you know what, I mean, because I have gotten at least some feedback that the tax office is not just overly excited about -- about having this in their lap. But okay it's not worth the night nun. Let's try it. But I do want us to be mindful of is that that is not going to work. I don't want to see this thing where all of a sudden the tax office needs more people. To do this 90 day deal because even though I may agree with some of my colleagues that, you know, I don't necessarily like to use, you know, a board to get you to pay which quite frankly a lot of times a third party is because it costs you more money. If we can collect it, we can collect it in an efficient way, then why not try that. But I don't want this thing to get so bogged down that all of a sudden, you know, we are -- we -- we have created a position where -- where third party says, you know, we don't really want to deal with this thing. This is just already a lot higher fruit, by the time the third party gets this thing. By the time somebody just basically goes through the routine of getting a citation, heck, I mean, by the time we get it even in our 90 days, in a lot of instances this thing is already several months, I'm looking at you judge, because I think that you can verify this. Sometimes you get them, there may be only four or five months old, but a lot of times by the time our collections people get them, they are older than three, four, five months. And, you know, these kind of things are like people writing you hot checks. I mean, when somebody writes you a $10 hot check, it's real soon that it's not worth even trying to collect the 10 did dollar hot check. It's kind of like forget it. We are spending more money on trying to collect it than, you know -- the point is there are a lots of dollars that it takes to do this. I just warrant to make sure that within maybe, you know, I year because it looks like July if we get the r.f.p. Out, we have another 30 days for that, we may have another vendor by the early fall, we have to kind of see how that works out, I don't want us to just kind of say okay this is the policy that we have set up, we do this from now on. If it work then great, I'm all for it. I want us to have the ability to step in and say we need to think about something else.
>> judge represent the other judges on the collections committee. I want to be careful how I tread here because this item is listed as the redo or modification of the third party vendor contract for precinct 3, which was a pilot program. Separate from the overall collections issue. In terms of giving y'all some enlightenment to be thinking about on how we approach the r.f.p. For a global kind of program, I can just give you some numbers that I happen to have with me because I'm working on budget. That is that since -- since April of '06 when we started the collections, the mandated collections program, my office has -- has sent over to the tax office for collections about almost 24,000 cases. 8200 of those were show causes meaning they signed up originally to take defensive driving or for deferral or something like that, they never came back and finished complying. We send them a show cause kind of letter. Based on the response from that, we issue a judgment, it got forwarded to the tax office. Then we have almost 12,000 straightforward, never saw them again kind of folks. Issue judgments. Those went to the tax office. This is with the folks that you all graded from last year. Of all of the 24,000, 2765 are the people that walk in the front door, then want the payment plans. That's how we had originally set up the transfer to the tax office simply because we weren't geared space wise or any other wise to handle that many people people wanting to be interviewed to make payment plans and setting that up. Of all of the cases that have been sent, actually over 25,000, 1,730 of those have been collected which leaves 23,800 uncollected ones still at the tax office. I will also tell you based on the numbers that I have here. Ments 27,315 warrants, which have nothing to do with the cases that are at the tax office. So you are really looking at 23805 plus 27315. 50,000 cases that are currently not collected. The rope I wanted to give you so much information is that I do believe philosophically the court itself has to come to decision as to how much you all want to pursue collections as a judge and elected officials. Obviously I have a job to do, which is to complete -- complete procedurally speaking everything according to the rules of criminal procedure or civil procedure or whatever set out for my court. As a taxpayer I understand every dollar that is not collected comes out of somebody else's pocket to fund all of the programs that the county is mandated to fund. I realize that it's a dual edged sword for everybody. I don't push things in my office just to collect revenue. I push things to do my job. We do that quite efficiently in my court. I think before we can get past the procedures, the internal procedures on how to work collections, we have to have a major philosophical agreement. And that's why I want to tread carefully. Because I believe that if we do the r.f.p. Without a lot of internal procedures built into it, which are going to change anyway, every time a legislature meets, that it will be a much smaller, much more easily digestible document that can be produced faster. If we keep the internal procedures internal and then we send whatever goes to third party,s I think constables also exer have discretion. One is indiana against, people cannot afford to pay. Another is jail credit, another is just. The reason that we are there in the very first place is justice. If it is -- if it is in the court's mind that justice is not being served by doing whatever, then it's purely our discretion to take care of that. We must keep that which means that we must build in procedures so that we are transferring cases to whomever, not another entity. The constable's office is not authorized to transfer my warrants to somebody else. I don't believe the tax office is authorized to transfer them somewhere else. I think those authorities have to say where they came from.
>> that's a great point. We will take up that challenge.
>> this is a simple modification, though.
>>
>> [multiple voices]
>> the conversation that you had last week was about the third party contract pilot out of precinct 3 and it had nothing to do with what all of the rest of us are still working on.
>> there are other conversations that need to take place...
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:00 AM