News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Putnam County wants to ramp up its collection process of fines in the Criminal Court System.
Putnam County Circuit Court Clerk Jennifer Wilkerson said State mandated fines placed by Judges in criminal cases can help offset the costs to operate the court system. She said the county wants to gain revenue from these fines because the only other way the county can gain revenue is through taxes.
“We try to recoup some of those costs from the people who are committing those crimes because that’s what the statute says that we should do,” Wilkerson said. “And so when we don’t recoup those costs, the burden is then laid on the taxpayer.”
Wilkerson asked the county’s budget committee to find a new full-time staffer just to follow up on bad debt.
Wilkerson said the court currently estimates that the cost to operate the courts is about eight to nine million dollars. She said that is a conservative estimate and that before the pandemic, the average amount was higher. She said they are currently only bringing in about half of that amount.
“We’re only collecting about a rate of about $3.5 Million a year, which is less than 50 percent,” Wilkerson said. “That actually equates to about 44 percent of that outstanding debt that’s there.”
Wilkerson said Putnam County has researched what other counties have done, and how successful they have been, and projects that Putnam County could have similar success if they follow similar methods.
“We believe in addition year one we will $100,000 to $120,000,” Wilkerson said. “And by year five, if we follow the methods that some of the other counties have, what we know works, we could collect anywhere upwards of two million dollars.”
Wilkerson said these estimates are on the conservative side, and it is possible that they could collect much more.
