No US city fines people like Washington fines people – By Dan Kopf & Justin Rohrlich (Quartz) / Jan 29 2020
American cities are struggling to pay the bills. Chicago, for one, is facing an $838 million budget deficit. Los Angeles’s budget director predicts an upcoming budget deficit of $200 million to $400 million. Over the next two years, San Francisco expects to be roughly $420 million in the hole. About 600 miles north, the city of Salem, Oregon is more than $16 million short of what it needs.
Twenty-five years ago, Washington was debt-ridden and needed a federal bailout to avoid going broke. By 2017, it was running an annual surplus of more than $100 million, with $2.4 billion in reserves, or roughly triple the District’s deficit in 1995.
Part of the reason behind the reversal in Washington’s fortunes comes from taxes. Few cities levy property, income, and sales taxes together, according to Michael A. Pagano, dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Washington does. Another part comes courtesy of something else altogether: fines.
Every five years, the US Census collects revenues and expenditures data from every state and local government. The most recent data is for 2017, and it was released in October 2019. The data show how much money every municipality gets from sources like property taxes, tobacco sales taxes and lottery revenue. Among the revenue categories is “Fines and Forfeits,” which is typically money the municipality received from penalties like speeding tickets and parking violations. Quartz analyzed the amount of “fines and forfeits” as a proportion of each municipalities population and found that among cities with over 200,000 people, Washington was an outlier, generating $261 per person in fines and fees. This is more than double New York City, the number two city in fines per person at $118. Not every city reported revenue data for 2017, including large cities like Austin, Texas and Detroit. Prior years data show those cities have had much lower rates of fines.
In Washington’s budget, it reports even higher numbers for “fines and forfeits” than in they do to the US Census. (Sometimes, the numbers differ because of different ways of categorizing revenues.) The city reports collecting $164 million from fines and forfeits in 2018. The city plans to continue to get a large, but shrinking amount of money from fines over the next several years, planning for $148 million in fines as far out as 2023. The city appears to know it should be weaning itself off this revenue source, but it plans to do it very slowly.
Continue to article: https://qz.com/1789851/no-us-city-fines-people-like-washington-dc/
