Police board chairman Joe Virdiramo says he wants a meeting with the attorney general to find a way to collect unpaid fines.
The City of Thunder Bay is owed $25.9 million in unpaid fines for provincial offences spanning the last three decades. The fines range from unpaid traffic tickets to liquor law infractions and trespassing. And while the city is owed millions, there is $1 billion in unpaid fines throughout the province of Ontario.
Last Wednesday, a report from the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards outlined the unpaid fines and asked for the province to start looking at ways to collect the fines in order to help hard-pressed municipalities.
Thunder Bay Police Services Board chairman Joe Virdiramo said while some of the fines are uncollectable, they need to petition Attorney General Chris Bentley and the government to invoke legislation to facilitate the collection of the fines.
“Policing costs are constantly going up because of the service we provide,” he said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “If we have officers out there ticketing people for good reason, then why aren’t we collecting these fines?”
“If there is a glitch in the legislation that allows us not to collect, then we need to fix that,” Virdiramo added.
The chairman said he intends to speak to the attorney general about the issue through the intergovernmental committee and he hopes to set up a meeting in February at the Ontario Good Roads conference in Toronto.
“I’ll make certain I run into him some way,” said Virdiramo.
Whatever fines can be collected would be used in the city’s general operating budget with a portion used for the police service, said Virdiramo.
In other police services board business, Deputy Chief Andy Hay gave an update on the police service’s planned upgrades to their information technology section, including a move to digital fingerprinting and electronic court reports.
Within the next few weeks, local police will move from manual fingerprinting with ink and paper to a live scan digital fingerprint system that can be electronically sent to the RCMP, which will allow them to get the results back faster.
Hay said they’ll first be using the new system for criminal record searches, but expect to soon use it for criminal submission.
The department is also looking at making their court report system electronic.
“Where we’re looking at for the new courthouse that’s opening in September 2013 is we’re hoping that our systems are a lot more efficient,” Hay said. “We’re looking at hopefully going to some type of electronic brief for our crown attorneys so that paper doesn’t have to physically flow between our building and the courthouse.”
There are some expected increases in capital costs for the IT upgrades. However, Hay said they hope to recover those increase and more through their reduced paper costs.
