Travis County Commissioners Court
July 3, 2007
Item 21
Number 21. Is to receive briefing and take appropriate action on the status of collections from the following programs. A, current and delinquent taxes from the tax office; b, criminal fines and fees from the tax office and planning and budget offices. Good morning.
>> good morning. Judge, Commissioners. Nelda wells spears, Travis County tax office. We're here to give you a brief report this morning on where we are as of this date. July 1st is the day that most tax offices are delivering delinquent tax rolls to their private attorneys. Today we have 20,253 delinquent taxpayers owing approximately $34 million in tax penalties and interest. If we used a private attorney, we would be attaching an additional $6.8 million in liability -- tax liabilities upon these taxpayers. Many of them are already struggling to pay their back taxes without this additional burden. Your county tax office and county attorney's office will continue working with these taxpayers to get their taxes paid. If absolutely necessary, we will file lawsuits to collect. Last year we were forced into the position of filing 676 lawsuits. And to date this year we've filed 456 lawsuits. These are the most extreme cases which after all our efforts have refused to pay their taxes. And some will result in being taken to foreclosure. In March, it was reported that foreclosures were especially hard on east Austin residents. This information was contrary to what I knew to be fact. We contacted the city of Austin and the lbj school of public affairs to review their data. According to their data, 327 properties were taken to foreclosure in the calendar year they sampled, 2006. Of those, 211 were outside the city limits, outside the city of Austin; 116 were inside. The city of Austin boundaries. 147 of the properties actually sold. None of the properties that sold were homesteads. The 30 properties -- there were 30 properties located in central east Austin. Review of those 30 properties revealed that all 30 were vacant lots. As a result of this review, dr. Robert l. Wilson, associate dean for academic affairs and research for the lbj school wrote: we conclude that these sales did not lead to residential displacement but in fact vacant lots were being brought into the market as a result of the sales, end quote. Each month my office sends you a listing of properties that we're considering for foreclosure for your review. There are other occasions when we've asked you to help us out with specific delinquent tax cases, and I want to thank each one of you for your help and your assistance with these accounts. With your assistance, many were paid in full. On July 1st, we had 344,662 property accounts paid in full for the current tax year. These properties represent 1.819 billion, that's a b, billion, dollars. And we're at 98.4% current year taxes collected. We're on target to reach 99% again by the end of this fiscal year. I want to thank all of these taxpayers because they are the ones who provide the majority of funding for the '96 taxing jurisdictions in Travis County. In January of '03, we started to collect county court fine and fee. Since then we've received 19,690 cases and collected an additional $10 million in fines and fees. In the first nine months of this fiscal year, we've received 3,534 cases, assessed at a little over $2 million. We've collected 1.99 million of that this year. The program spikes at the beginning of a probation cycle and at the end of the probation cycle. The defendants that we don't collect 100% in the beginning are monitored and by working closely with cscd, we collect any balance before the defendant gets off probation. I want to thank the courts and the county clerk and cscd for all their help in getting this done. In April of last year, we started the j.p. Court fine and fee collection. We've received a total of 29,365 cases with an assessment of $6,088,110. I’m pleased to report we're importing cases on a daily basis from the j.p. Court. In the first nine months we received 27,744 cases. We processed 8,999 payments for a total of $987,187. Part of this money has come from collections from j.p. 3, constable 3 and the third-party vendor for j.p. 3. We've received 1,107 new cases from constable 3 and j.p. 3 for collections and transfer to the third-party vendor if we're not successful in our collection efforts. My thanks go to the j.p.s and their staff for their collaboration in this endeavor. It's been a learning curve for us and we appreciate the patience shown by the j.p.s. My staff and I will entertain any questions you may have regarding this report.
>> first and foremost, I want to say thanks so much for the report, and I guess I just don't remember getting the report before, and it's really good to get it. Let me tell you. And because this is where I know we can get the facts straight and not have to read it somewhere elsewhere it's interpreted very differently. And so thank you to much for the report, and I guess I can look forward to the report every year.
>> yes, ma'am.
>> okay.
>> if there aren't any other questions, I would like to turn the remainder of this reporting over to leroy nellis of planning and budget.
>> thank you. I just want to take this opportunity to applaud nelda and her staff, dusty, renee and all of the central collection staff on the job that they've done on these criminal fines and fees. You may recall when the court first designed planning and budget to kind of spearhead this, we -- you know, it was a challenge. And it remains a challenge, but I think thanks to nelda and dusty, renee and their staff, we have been able to collaborate with the justice of the peaces and come together and put together a very, very reputable central collection unit in the tax assessor's office and I applaud them for that. Assisting these men, travis and deanna from the planning and budget office. Without their help and the justice of the peace, we would not have been able to bring this unit together under nelda. The electronic transfer of these cases has not come easy and I know that dusty and renee and staff have worked endless hours with our outside vendor to make that electronic interface possible. And all of these improvements, getting these cases into central collections, is some of the cleanup that's required in the conversion to facts, which will be coming in the latter part of this year. I did submit to you the backup that the office of court administration furnished us on the period, the collections by court from December 1st of '04 through November 30th of '05 in which they had indicated on the graph on page 3 of my backup that out of all of the people participating in the mandatory 1863 collection improvement program, that Travis County was third in the state for that nine-month period. This was actually April of 2006 through December 2006. Of producing an additional $749,000 to the state, third only to the city of fort worth and the city of houston.
>> and this graph doesn't reflect per capita collection, this is just a straight sum.
>> this is just straight dollars. And, you know, it will be a combination obviously of the increased collection efforts of our central collection. It would be also any increased -- increase of existing fines and fees due to volume. So -- but it is an indication of the result of the efforts of centralizing and implementing state-of-the-art collection procedures on these fines and fees. I might mention that the collection of delinquent taxes also is a big, it helps in collecting current taxes. So it all goes hand in hand and we look forward to pushing many more cases from the constables or bringing out cases that have warrants on them that have exceeded the 120 or 150 days. Those will be going back to the j.p.s and then will be electronically transferred to central collections. On the next page, you'll see by court the collection rates, and as we pointed out in bold on the first page of my memo to you, these collection rates are cases without conviction or non-adjudicated cases are not included in these statistics. One of the big challenges has to be with collecting those failure to appear cases and what we're getting hold of with the central connections clunt, the ones that fall even outside these collection statistics that you sigh. Because these statistics are actually higher than what I had anticipated, but it leaves out a large percent of those northern adjudicated cases, all of those. So we're looking forward to getting all those cases into the central collections, and then eventually we do have a draft r.f.p. That we're going to be sending out to all the elected officials involved for a third-party vendor to pick up the cases that central collections has not been able to successfully collect. So as we had indicated previously, we'll be bringing a draft of that to you probably late July, early August, and with the revisions that the elected officials have made. Hopefully we can get it on the street August, September time frame.
>> that's way beyond our three or four-month commitment of five months ago.
>> well, I think what I had indicated to you, judge, was that we would attempt to get you, the court, the draft the latter part of July or the first part of August. I think that's consistent. Now, if the court has no revisions to that draft, we can get it out the first part of August. As soon as we have the county attorneys review, comments, we're integrating that into the r.f.p.
>> when will it be on the court's agenda for approval? July 17th?
>> no, we have not sent it out to the elected officials. We've worked with a small study group on it, and I would say that the last Tuesday in July or the first -- I’d feel more comfortable with the first Tuesday in August to be on the agenda.
>> I just think we ought to go ahead and do it. There's nothing magical about an r.f.p. It's been a year. Not to cut you off. I’ve got three or four questions after you get done.
>> I think there has been some sticking points that we were trying to work out.
>> we can't work them out without seeing a draft. They may be worked out. It's been six months since we discussed this.
>> we will be glad -- if the first Tuesday in August is okay with the court, I know that we can get you the draft in the state it's in at that point to the court.
>> for me it's been longer.
>> a couple questions.
>> yes.
>> senate bill 280 provided a reward for those who voluntarily complied. So do we sit in eager anticipation of delivery of our reward or have we earned it?
>> senate bill 280 did not pass. Almost passed.
>> sorry. I was looking at the part that says with a reward for doing so.
>> I understand.
>> have we earned a reward?
>> it almost passed, we almost got it.
>> so the reward is gone.
>> the bill did not pass, is my understanding.
>> okay. How do we compare the precinct 3 collection effort where we have a private vendor available to take I guess the worst of the cases and the other precincts where we don't have the pilot in place?
>> the total collections?
>> right. Do we think it was dramatically better thanks to the pilot program or can we see a difference?
>> absolutely. I mean it's -- there's more collection.
>> total collection rate is just --
>> those cases were the hard cases. Did they fit the criteria that of the established by the comptroller's
>> [inaudible] of not including -- did they include those that had f.t.a.s, the truly hard cases eye can get the answer some other time.
>> there were different procedures that were in place in j.p. 3 than what are in place in the other j.p. Offices. I think if you look at the pre -- well, we need to get back to you with the collections.
>> we need a apples to apples comparison to make the call. The question is whether we expanded from one precinct to five, right?
>> right.
>> but if the advantages are not there, another question would be why identity. If the advantages are there, then we ought to do it, but we need an apples to apples comparison is my point. Next question: who keeps up with the community service projects? I mean does -- is that out of ms. Hale's shop?
>> I assume it is.
>> because what we're doing is appropriately converting some of the fines that we're not getting anyway to community service, and I just -- we -- it ought to be possible for us to keep a list of necessary community service projects and, you know, work against that list. So they may have more than they can do already, but if not I think we can probably get with some of our department heads and supplement the list.
>> we will be glad to survey and see what type of community service projects and an evaluation from their point of view as to whether they need more community projects and how many hours they believe they could fill. We'll be glad to report that when we bring the r.f.p. Back.
>> judge, I want to go back to the point about the third party. There is no question that having the opportunity for a third party to collect delinquent fines and fees is something -- I will tell you as a taxpayer, I would insist that you have it. We have a system set up now that we have our people take every one of these cases that the j.p. And the constable doesn't do, which is that sort of middle gap that we didn't have before. But there are those cases that you all say for me to continue to work on these, I am spending money, I am spending man-hours on something that my return is not very good. Those are the ones that need to go to third parties. I mean because whatever the third party collects is more than we're not going to have. I mean we do have a system now that we will give you every opportunity in the world to pay your fine and fee. And quite frankly, you owe the people of this community the fine and fee just like you owe your ad valorem taxes. That is something that this Commissioners court, you know, we have a fiduciary responsibility to do. So I don't want us to think that third party is something sinister. I mean the only reason that you are getting it is because we have exhausted everything that we can do to collect. But we still need one other shot, and the unfortunate thing about it is if you get pushed to that being the source that is going to do your collections, guess what? Yes, it is going to cost you a little bit more, but you have to have somebody doing that business, and if they are going to do that business, there's got to be incentive for them to be in business. So there's nothing wrong as far as I’m concerned. I’m very willing to, you know, I got a parking tirkt out in the middle of Austin, I come back and I write it right then. Because that's what you are supposed to do and that's what is expected of us. And so I think that we give --
>> those of us who supported the pilot program, including the county judge, supported it because it was necessary to see hard data. And a pilot program would enable us to do that and we ought to do that is all I’m saying.
>> and we will. Sure. And I don't think there's any question that the pilot program with the third party vendor was very beneficial and collected a lot of fines.
>> I just wanted that recognized.
>> right. I don't have facts to contradict that conclusion.
>> right.
>> but I don't have facts to support it either.
>> [laughter]
>> the only facts that we've reported to the court have been periodic third-party vendor statistics. What we've not reported to you and we will, we'll come back, are those comparison percentages of the j.p.'s, the once using versus the ones that were not.
>> and there are questions that can be address understand the r.f.p. One is the definition, a specific definition of what are hard cases, the ones referred to as ridiculously difficult to collect. Have you to define that, and we can, that's not an insurmountable hurdle. And the second is the availability of statistics from the private vendor in order to include our sentencing policies so we can increase our collections not just for the sake of collection but for the sake of justice and appropriate sentencing. And those are two issues that can be addressed in the r.f.p. And my understanding was we were working toward addressing them.
>> sure.
>> thanks for stimulating our interest again in this fascinating area of public service.
>> thank you.
>> thank you all very much. See you all real soon with that r.f.p.
>> you will.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, July 3, 2007, 8:00 AM