Miami Student

Issue date: 4/3/09 Section: Community

Beginning April 6, individuals with late dues to Butler County Area Courts since 2001 will have to pay an extra cost to a collection company.

Butler County is taking a new approach to collecting outstanding court fees.

Butler County area courts (I, II and III) are implementing a policy to send individuals with outstanding court fees to a collection agency beginning April 6.

"Basically what we are looking at are people who have just totally ignored us, and this goes back to the year 2000," said Linda Lovelace, court administrator for Butler County Area I Court. "We have sent them letters letting them know that they have to pay, and some people have ignored us for years. We have been willing to work with people, but once it goes to the collection agency it's out of our hands."

Typically, if an individual has not yet paid for a court case, he can either send the money to the court to pay the fine or show up for a court date and plead guilty or not guilty. If the individual neglects to act at all, the new policy says the collection agency will be notified of the outstanding fine.

Capital Recovery Systems, the collection agency that has been hired by Butler County to carry out the new approach, currently represents about 240 courts in a six-state region. President of Capital Recovery Systems Craig Klein said the collection agency's services have enabled the creation of new jobs in Ohio.

"It's a win for everybody," Klein said. "It's a win for the courts and the defendants. We have also created 75 jobs in Ohio to do this."

Butler County court officials have been warning residents about the new collection fee policy since November. The county still has individuals with overdue fees dating back to 2001.

"We mailed out letters in November, December and January to all of our outstanding accounts from Jan. 1, 2001 up until now, and we also put out press releases in local newspapers," Lovelace said.

Lovelace said Butler County area courts have been looking to alleviate the extra work in chasing down individuals with overdue fees for a while.

"We did not just jump into this," Lovelace said. "Before we started the project, we actually did research and called probably 30 municipal and county courts and asked them who they used and how satisfied they were."

The new partnership between Butler County and Capital Recovery Systems will not be at the cost of taxpayers as the individual defendants are paying for the agency's fees, Klein said.

"The court's job is to administer cases and collect fines and costs to go along with the cases," Klein said. "When someone does not pay, the courts don't normally have the manpower, resources, and money to chase them around the United States. That's where we come in. The fact that we can do it without any cost from the taxpayer is really attractive to those courts."

Klein said the number of people in Ohio who currently owe outstanding fees is in the millions.

"We've collected more than $90 million from Ohio courts alone, and that money goes right back into the communities that we are working for," Klein said.

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