From the Jeffersonville News and Tribune:
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The issue I want to clarify is simply that these funds were never an additional charge on any fine. The price of a levied fine would have been the same even had Judge Fleece not started the program. I will try to explain in simple terms and by using a hypothetical round number of a $100 fine.
What Judge Fleece did was find something of a technicality in the law that would allow a portion of the ticket price to remain locally to be used for drug and alcohol awareness programs and some funds were even used to administer the program — such as by paying the salaries involved with processing the fines and some associated court costs. Where the real issue came up was how some funds were being used for things like funding youth programs or buying equipment.
The result of the audit and the discontinuing of the program is very simply this: One hundred percent of all fines paid will now go the state and a bureaucrat in Indianapolis will decide how to distribute those funds. That means the funds that were being used in the county will no longer be spent in Clark County. Since there never was a raise in the fines assessed for the program, there will correspondingly be no lowering of any fines levied. In both cases, a person would have paid the exact same amount.
I do not have a final figure at this point, but am being told that close to $750,000 that was being used as a supplement by county government for some services associated with the ticket fines and accompanying court expenses will now have to come out of county government taxes and another three quarters of a million dollars will have to come out of the already overstretched county budget.
This program has been going on for decades and has continuously been audited. It now somehow smells of something political that after almost 20 years, this is being scrutinized so thoroughly. Judge Fleece has admitted that some of the expenditures in retrospect were requests to which he should have said “no” to. For those, any criticism is justifiable and probably deserved.
You have to decide as a taxpayer if this result is a plus or minus for you and if the state controlling agency will see that we get the share of what was being kept to spend in Clark County.
http://newsandtribune.com/columns/x474412540/DODD-Where-do-you-want-your-money-going
