[H]elana Martin was 13 years old when an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in plainclothes caught her smoking a cigarette and issued her a citation with a fine she says she couldn’t pay. Sixty days later, she got a notice that her driver’s license was suspended — two years before she would even be old enough to get one.
“And here I am, 27, still without a license, three kids, not being able to get around because when I was 13 I made a silly mistake,” she told lawmakers last week.
Martin is one of the 59,000 Vermonters with a suspended license that lawmakers are trying to address with H.571, a bill that proposes changes to Vermont’s laws on driver’s license suspension, or DLS. Now several weeks into taking testimony on the issue, the House Judiciary Committee will be working on the bill this week.
Martin, who lives in Cambridge, told the panel last week that she has driven despite being unlicensed and has racked up tickets.
Driving is critical to getting around and caring for her family, she said. Her 3-year-old is in the Head Start program. She said she needs to decide whether to get behind the wheel to get him there.
“Does he miss the day of school, or do I risk it?” Martin said.
Often when she was pulled over it was by an officer who recognized her and knew she wasn’t licensed to drive. Sometimes it was for driving with an expired registration, she said.
She took care of many of the outstanding tickets at a driver restoration day held in Chittenden County in March, where residents could pay off delinquent tickets at $25 apiece. But the total cost of the fines was still too much for her, she said.
“It’s just been fines on top of fines on top of fines,” Martin said.
A task force of prosecutors, state officials and others met through the summer and fall to put together a recommendation for how the Legislature could revise laws to remove the economic barrier that keeps many Vermonters from regaining their driving privileges.
The initial bill proposed creating an indigent waiver — a tiered payment level through which people who qualify economically could pay traffic violation tickets at half the price.
But some, including Vergennes Police Chief George Merkel, oppose the idea of charging Vermonters different amounts for tickets based on their income.
“Whether you drive a car and you make X amount of dollars or you drive a car and you make X amount of dollars, everybody’s responsibility and privilege is the same,” Merkel said.
Merkel, who was also representing the Vermont Police Association, testified in front of the committee last week. He said that when law enforcement issues tickets, it’s with public safety in mind.
“When we enforce motor vehicle law, we do it to keep our highways safe,” Merkel said. “And when we issue tickets or fines we do it in order to modify a person’s behavior, and that’s the whole premise behind it.”
The House Judiciary Committee is still hammering out how the new DLS system would work. The committee is planning to dismiss all outstanding tickets from before 1990 — in part because many of the records were damaged in a fire at the Judicial Bureau. A total of $54,000 worth of pre-1990s tickets remains, according to the task force report.
But many details of the bill remain up in the air.
Rep. Maxine Grad, D-Moretown, who chairs the committee, said her colleagues are still working out how to offer “geographical justice.” The committee wants to ensure that Vermonters who live in counties that haven’t held a driver restoration day have an opportunity to address outstanding tickets. In addition to Chittenden County, Windsor County has held one.
The committee is also working out how to adjust the system so Vermonters with limited income avoid having one ticket snowball into a pile.
“It’s foolish to just do restoration so to speak if you haven’t dealt with the problem going forward,” said Rep. Willem Jewett, D-Ripton, during committee discussion.
Grad said the committee is weighing several options, including making alternative payment schedule programs more readily available when someone receives a ticket. Jewett mentioned that there are several proposals the committee is still considering; one would shorten the period of suspension from 120 days to 30 days.
But Jewett said this issue is likely to take longer to solve than a single legislative session.
“We’re going to make some changes, and we’re going to need some robust reporting,” Jewett said.
Chris Curtis, of Vermont Legal Aid, said his organization strongly supports the version of the bill the task force proposed, which includes the waiver option for people who qualify based on a limited income.
He said it’s important that lawmakers produce a bill with some form of income sensitivity, so low-income Vermonters are not locked out of getting back on the roads legally.
He also wants to see the law changed so offenses not related to driving do not result in license suspension — as with the underage tobacco offense that led to Helana Martin’s license being suspended.
DLS suspension is a “massive problem,” Curtis said. The new policy needs to “allow people to pay it and move on with their lives.”