Travis County Commissioners Court
August 21, 2007
Item 4
Number 4. Excuse me, let me play county judge. Consider and take appropriate action on draft request for services for third party collections of delinquent criminal fines and fees for justice courts. Mr. Nellis is recognized by the presiding officer of the county.
>> we're here to discuss with you and answer any questions you might have about the draft request for services for the collection of delinquent criminal fines and fees for the justice courts. I'd like to start by thanking all of the participants in this process. We have engaged the auditor's office, the justices of the peace, all of them, the constables, i.t.s., tax office, headed by dusty and nelda wells spears and renee. The county attorney's office, the purchasing office and my staff with the planning and budget office, travis and deanna. We have with us dusty here knight from the tax assessor, collector's office. We have worked diligently for a long time to come up with a document that we felt that all the parties felt comfortable with submitting to the court for consideration, and then the next step would be for you to approve the r.f.s. And then have the purchasing department put it out on the street and entertain bids on the r.f.s. I did summarize on the first page of my cover memo to you essentially some of the highlights of the attached r.f.s. We did recommend that all of the cases go through the central collections unit located in the tax office, really supervised by dusty and his staff. And then as those -- they do the initial collection efforts on those after the j.p. And the constables have turned them over to central collections, and then they be recommended for referral to a third party vendor under this contract once the court awards the contract for further collection efforts. We would -- and you will see in the r.f.s. That we have required that the vendor, the successful vendor report not only to the individual justice of the peace offices, the collection on their accounts, but also to the central collections and to the Commissioners court on a regular basis. We have recommended that all of the collections, all of the efforts by the third party vendor, that the actual dollar collections be made through the central collections unit. That's something that we picked up through some of the other r.f.s.s of the other county that have gone out. Now, we have made provision, we don't want to turn anybody away, if somebody comes up or sends money to the third party collector, we have a provision for them to collect that and then remit it to the central collection unit. But we would expect that to be the exception rather than the rule. I have posed a couple of questions for the court to determine that need to be answered by the court before we put this r.f.s. Out. And I would say that as you notice on the r.f.s., we had anticipated that it may take more than one court session, more than one agenda item in order to get the final approval and have such dated the r.f.s. I think September 11th, which would give you a week or so to consider how to -- what your recommendation on some of these items are. One of the items has to do with these old cases that do not statutorily allow third party vendor to add the 30% or whatever the percentage collection fee on. In which case Travis County would be required, if in fact the court directed us to forward those to a third party collector, Travis County would be required to pay budget and pay the collection fee on those accounts. Now, the tricky part of that is that Travis County does not get 100% of all of those fines and fees. As a matter of fact, most of the fees, I believe, go to the state, and we were able to look at a sample of the fine portion of those -- some of those categories. I know Texas parks and wildlife fines go 85% to the state and 15% to the county. A lot of the other fines go 50% to the county and 50% to the state. So that is one issue that we have raised with the court. Our recommendation is to allow us to forward those cases to the -- to the third party vendor, but that the vendor be able to bid the percentage that they are going to charge for a collection fee and that we assess that only on the fine portion. In which case what we're attempting to do is avoid the situation where Travis County is actually paying more in a collection fee than they would receive for their part of the fine and fee. So that --
>> are we authorized to do that? Do we believe that we're authorized to do that?
>> we believe and I -- barbara?
>> the statute that allows us to enter into a collection agreement has a subsection that specifically addresses our authority to contract for a collection group to collect those fines and fees that related to the period prior to when the 30% statutory amount can be added. And so it's not even gray. It's black better law.
>> is that the recommendation of the j.p.'s?
>> that the the recommendation of all of the members, the j.p.s, constables.
>> my concern is how do we make sure that all of these elected officials agree with what we're doing? We've seen instances where someone says something today and then tomorrow it may change because of whatever reasons. I don't really know. But is there any mechanism -- because this is a process. It's a pretty indepth step-by-step process that involves a lot of folks, a lot of departments, a lot of elected officials. And what I'm concerned about is essentially there is an indepth process. There may be some changes along the way in this process that somebody may not feel comfortable about after we get to the point of saying, okay, let's go ahead and do it. Then someone wants to back out or says hey, I'm not able to deal with this. How can we ensure the process is adhered to and we do not have any deviation from the direction in which we are trying to do since we have to deal with so many elected officials.
>> Commissioner, in the cover page I pointed out that the way that we had drafted this r.f.s., that it does give the individual elected justice of the peace the authority to make the final decision on whether or not their cases get referred to the third party vendor. I mean that's --
>> and in addition to giving them the authority of referring them, if we were to have all of the cases of, say, justice of the peace referred over to them whil she is justice of the peace and she should choose to be something else and is replaced by somebody entirely different and that new person chose not to have any of the cases forwarded over you, that new person has the right to pull every single one of those cases back immediately. And so you have both the ability to refer and the ability to withdraw whenever the court feels inclined to withdraw. So you are not -- if you jump into it now and then decide you don't like it a year from now, you can get out of it by withdrawing all your cases. So the j.p.s retain control over their cases.
>> I was wondering how that works because I hear from judge bremmer and other elect officials, but I don't think I've heard from every elect official, every j.p. In the situation, every constable in the situation. I don't think we've ever had them before to us tell us what I'm asking and that is to get a commitment in this. Not saying they can't jump out or jump in or opt out and opt in and all these other kind of things, it's just I want to make sure whatever we end up doing we're doing it in an effective way, and this appears to be a way we can get there. But I just want to make sure that the elected officials are aware of the urgency of a commitment to the end until will we at least get this thing going and up running properly. So that's my question. I've got others, but that's my first trying to set the stage.
>> and I can say that my staff, dusty, all of us have met with all the justices of the peace and all of the constables, and that the justices of the peace had elected judge bembry to represent their interests and all of the justices are in agreement with this r.f.s. And judge bembry was here, but she had another appointment this afternoon. She was going to relay that to you.
>> okay.
>> we do not have a disagreement among the elected officials, that I'm aware of, on this r.f.s. We have shared multiple drafts. Deanna, three or four different drafts and incorporated their comments. So we feel comfortable that the judges ultimately are the ones that control the cases, and in this r.f.s., they do control it.
>> my question was on that number 5, old cases, what are we calling old cases? What date is on them? What's the year, the cutoff year?
>> are they -- 2002? The statute specifically -- at the point the statute was passed to allow third party vendors to add a collection fee, they could not go back retroactive. And we do have a date. I think it was March of 2002. And we have not in our pilot program with j.p. 3, precinct 3, we have not forwarded any cases that the third party vendor could not assess their collection fee on top of the amount.
>> then how do we handle folks who won't be able to afford to pay the fines and fees?
>> most of the -- most of the cases that are referred that central collections is collect, they set them up on a payment plan.
>> okay.
>> and if anyone is indigent, they can always go back, they are referred back to the judge that has the jurisdiction to determine if there is indigency.
>> you have built in additional days for us to mull over this before we take action.
>> that's correct.
>> if we act next Tuesday, is that soon enough?
>> that will be fine with us.
>> could I ask a couple of questions?
>> surely.
>> so I can mull with an informed mulling. The statute authorizes up to 30%. Is that what we envision going to the 30%? Is it up to 30% or is it 30%?
>> it's 30%.
>> so there is no wiggle room statutorily.
>> bottom line.
>> for cases that come subsequent to that provision.
>> yes. And then -- laying aside any philosophical conversations about private collections, the purpose, as I understand sba-63 was for us to improve collection of dallas utilizing
>> [inaudible]. And so pursuant to that, what kind of -- have we bench marked what our current practices are and collection rates so we can compare them against a third party when the contract is implemented? Is that what the --
>> we have collection rates and one of the things that we've attached to the backup are the collection rates of central collections starting in January of '07 and going through July of '07. The -- when you compare collection rates of a third party vendor with collection rates of, say, the central collection unit, as we've noted in the footnote that the primary activity of the central collections unit has been to set up partial payments agreements with these people and get the very current and fresh cases. So you would expect that your central collection unit, your constables' efforts, your warrant roundups, all of these activities that Travis County goes through to collect things on owed -- fines and fees owed to them would have a higher collection percentage because what we're going to recommend to turn over to a third party vendor are those we have not been successful with.
>> right. So what I'm asking is do we have a bench mark, do we have a basis for knowing what our collection rate was on the same universe of cases that we are anticipating contracting out for? What you just said is what the note says that it's not a apples to apples comparison.
>> right.
>> do we have a apples to apples comparison so we can see if we are living up to the spirit of the statute which is improve our collection rates through the use of -- the statute says it's to improve our collection rate either in-house or at your discretion through private vendor.
>> and in answer to your question, Commissioner, Travis County has had very little, if any, collection efforts on these cases that will eventually be referred to the third party vendor. I do notice --
>> but let me say I did it when I was constable and I did work those warrants down. So it is possible to do it, but you have to spend all your time working on warrants and civil process. Which is exactly what the outside contractor is going to do in this particular case.
>> right.
>> which may be absolutely the best practices. What I'm after here, I'm not saying don't identity. What I'm after is -- let me phrase it a different way. What performance measures are we going to have in place inside the contract to assure that we are implementing best practices as anticipated by the statute? Because we may get -- you know, we may get better performance than what you were able to do in-house previously, but it's not not best practice and we should be shooting for excellence here. So how are we going to measure the performance of third party collections?
>> we will have some collections statistics on the cases that we refer to the third party vendor as to what our collection statistics on the failure to appears. A lot of these cases that will eventually go to a third party vendor, for example, jp-2 has pushed 11,849 cases for failure to appear to central collections. They are going through the initial 30 to 90-day collection period on these f.t.a.s. We will have collection statistics from central collections on what we can collect, and then we will compare those to what the third party collects. In the r.f.s., we believe that we have required the vendors to demonstrate that they are using best practices in their collection activities. And that's what's required inside this r.f.s. Of the vendors that bid on it. So that's the answer. We will compare their collections statistics with what we've been able to do, understanding that we've already tried to collect those. So whatever they collect are on cases that we have not been able to collect.
>> and I understand that. But I think what I'm driving at is -- I mean we have a twin obligation to be both
>> [inaudible] and equitable so whatever in-house we can do we should do in house being mindful of the distribution of labor that takes. As we go into the third party contracts, I guess what I'm driving at here is I want to make sure that we have adequate -- that we're getting adequate information back from the contractor so that we can improve and standardize our procedures in house, not just in collections but the jps and the constables so we can maximize effort. My concern is we outsource a significant knowledge base that could really improve our practices in house, not just in collections but in everything that comes before the collection process. Just back to what we had discussed when this item came up before regarding what kind of -- what kind of data that we could get back from the vendor so we are prove our sentencing power, issuing of warrants and execution of warrants to minimize a need for
>> [inaudible] so that we could bring those jp cases to justice. Not that we aren't already, I'm just looking for every way we can to, you know,
>> [inaudible].
>> we will have another opportunity next week to discuss this.
>> thank you.
>> thank you all very much. One member of the court is elated, trillion dollar, otherwise very happy to see this, mr. Nellis, thanks to you and your crew.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007, 18:30 AM