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Coffee Talk (Tampa edition)
Nothing fine with fine collection
Florida Auditor General William O. Monroe has raised more concerns about how state court officials assess and collect fees and fines.
In a report made public last month, Monroe says the state's trial bench failed to assess an estimated $516 million in fees and fines in criminal and traffic courts. His auditors seldom could find documentation to explain why the levies were waived during the 2002 fiscal year, Monroe says.
Judges in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Sarasota and seven other counties were more likely to treat these assessments as discretionary, based on a statewide sampling of cases conducted by Monroe's auditors.
Another $83 million worth of fees and fines that were assessed have yet to be collected, according to Monroe. The auditor general placed partial blame on some clerks who don't use collection agencies or send written notification to the scofflaws.
The clerks in Charlotte and Sarasota counties were among those singled out for praise for using collection agencies.
Finally, when fines and fees did come into the court system, some county clerks weren't always placing the cash in interest-bearing or investment accounts before disbursing the funds to the appropriate jurisdiction or state agency. State law requires them to do so, says Monroe.
The clerks in Hillsborough and Sarasota were among only a handful that Monroe tested and found were handling and investing court assessments in conformance with state law.
The Office of Program Policy and Government Accountability, a legislative project to increase the efficiency of Florida government known as OPPAGA, earlier studied the same issues with input from judicial officials.
Judges, clerks and court administrators had plenty to tell Monroe about his findings, too.
As the judges told OPPAGA, they don't have the time or the resources to memorialize their reasoning for deviating from sentencing guidelines when it comes to monetary penalties. Even if they could, the judges say it might not be desirable. Written rationales could provide another avenue for appeal of sentences.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Barbara J. Pariente took exception to a few of Monroe's conclusions. "I disagree with the assertion ¦ that judges actively advocate for increased discretion," Pariente wrote in an Aug. 3 letter to the auditor general. "While judges naturally want the punishment to fit the crime and an individual defendant's circumstances, they know that decision does not reside with them where the Legislature has clearly expressed an intent to make a certain cost mandatory."
Pariente was in agreement with one Monroe recommendation: Consolidate the references to fees and fines currently scattered throughout Florida Statutes into a central statute.
Safe and not sorry
In case you didn't notice, the wheels of justice in the Tampa Bay area ground to a halt this week. The state trial courts in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties shut down for Hurricane Ivan and could not be reopened right away.
By Sept. 14, when Ivan's projected path was distinctly leading toward the Florida Panhandle and away from the Bay area, local schools had resumed classes. But the courts were not yet back in session.
Hillsborough Chief Judge Manuel Menendez Jr. says his courts won't be in business again until Sept. 17. (The courts were already scheduled to take off Sept. 16 for Rosh Hashana, the observance of the Jewish New Year.)
The Hillsborough courts were scheduled to conduct first appearances as well as juvenile detention and shelter hearings on a holiday schedule between Sept. 14 and 16.
Unapologetic officials say there were good reasons for the slow return to business as usual. Most of the front end of the information technology that runs the court system had to be dismantled, several days ahead of the storm's initial expected landfall in the Bay area.
In Tampa, where the courthouses are on low-lying downtown streets prone to flooding in severe storms, computer terminals were unplugged and carefully stuffed into plastic wrap.
The bay area courts weren't alone in being left looking too prepared. The state courts in Charlotte, Collier and Lee counties remained closed on Sept. 14, too. But they planned to reopen on Sept. 15.
The Second District Court of Appeal cancelled oral arguments on cases that were to be heard in Tampa on Sept. 14, in Lakeland on Sept. 15 and in Wauchula on Sept. 17.
It's hard to second-guess the local call. Hurricane Andrew changed everything. But surely there must be a faster way for the courts to pull back if a big storm blows the other way.
The court dockets are going to be extra crowded for a while to make up the lost days. Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Barbara J. Pariente will entertain requests from local chief judges on extending filing deadlines where they have been thrown out of whack.
Passengers, airline seek protection
One member of the Coffee Talk team showed his true colors this week by hastily catching a plane out of Florida ahead of Hurricane Ivan.
Booking passage online on one of the airlines flying to New England out of Tampa before Ivan was a little like bidding on a particularly valuable item on Ebay. The harder you clicked, the faster the price seemed to go up.
Many of the airlines, of course, fill up their planes using complicated load-factor management forecasting. Passengers pay a wide variety of fares, depending on when and through what method they booked. It's supposed to be the free market as unfettered as it gets in such a regulated industry.
Suffice to say, demand was outstripping the supply of open northbound seats from Tampa International Airport on the Saturday before Ivan's dreaded landfall.
Not only were there petrified Gulf Coasters seeking safer ground up north, but more leisurely flyers had already reserved seats for the beginning of the foliage-viewing season in northern New England. Good timing by the Florida-based leaf peekers.
It may come as no surprise that the only airline where the Coffee Talk deserter could find a place was with US Airways Inc. The troubled carrier was to file Chapter 11 for the second time over that weekend.
An imminent bankruptcy filing may have given US Airways customers pause when gate attendants made an announcement. They were looking for people to give up their seats on a Tampa-to-Pittsburgh flight in exchange for the usual free, round-trip ticket anywhere in the Lower 48 in the next year.
The headlines were working against the offer. If US Airways could ditch its employee pension obligations in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, then what would stop it from forgetting about your free ticket? Would the legacy carrier even be in business to honor it in another year?
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