Published Sunday, December 12, 2010, by the Contra Costa Times

Toll scofflaws get free ride with confidential license plates

By Thomas Peele and Josh Richman
Contra Costa Times

For 18 months Scofflaw No. 593 blew through FasTrak toll plazas at two Bay Area bridges almost every day and never paid up.

Scofflaw No. 593 -- named for the random number assigned to the anonymous driver in regional toll reports -- was able to do this because the driver was part of a largely outmoded program that prevents certain government employees' addresses from being traced through their license plates. Because they can't easily be traced, some are abusing the system by intentionally zipping through FasTrak lanes without an electronic toll account.

In all, 1.5 million government employees, elected officials and their families have the so-called "confidential address" plates, part of a program started in 1978 to protect police and others involved in law enforcement from being tracked to their homes by criminals.

Those drivers could be police officers, an officer's spouse or child, judges, prison guards, child abuse investigators, state legislators or even museum guards.

Who are they specifically?

Don't ask. It's a secret, even when laws get broken.

Public records show Scofflaw No. 593 dodged a bridge toll -- $4 at the time -- 467 times in 18 months, sometimes twice in the same day. That's $1,868 in unpaid tolls. If the average citizen did this once, a ticket would soon arrive in his or her mailbox ordering payment of the skipped toll plus a $25 fine, though the fine would be waived if the driver signed up for FasTrak.

And Scofflaw No. 593 isn't alone. He or she is one of 4,415 drivers who blew through Bay Area bridge tolls 27,335 times from June 2008 to May 2010 without paying while driving a car registered through the Department of Motor Vehicles' confidential address program, playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can with toll authorities while the rest of the motoring public coughed up the $4 toll or faced fines.

Eventually, these scofflaws with confidential plates can sometimes be tracked down to their places of employment. But even when they are found, toll data show they aren't paying, or, in some cases, paying as little as 12 cents per violation. That's how much one driver paid for each of 242 violations -- a total of $29.04 -- when the violator was located, according to data the Metropolitan Transportation Commission released last week.

Another scofflaw skipped tolls 458 times and has yet to pay.

The top seven violators in the 18 months of data obtained and analyzed by Bay Area News Group combined for 2,547 violations, or $10,188 in unpaid tolls. Of those seven drivers only one of them has paid anything: a total of $314 for 385 violations. That's about 82 cents per toll.

An MTC spokesman said last week that the collection process "appears to us to have little value at this point."

It is expensive and time consuming, said the spokesman, Randy Rentschler, and "allows some people to abuse the system." He said he could not explain how some people were able to pay so little after being found.

It could be because MTC negotiated a settlement or too much time expired, voiding many of the violations.

"We have what we have because it is in law," Rentschler said. "We are accustomed to writing this off."

When the program was implemented in 1978 to protect law enforcement, anyone could walk into a DMV office with a plate number and walk out with a vehicle owner's home address. But motor vehicle laws have been changed to keep the addresses of all drivers confidential. Still, more public employees continued to lobby for inclusion in the confidential plate program.

Not even other public entities -- which also treat the information confidentially -- can obtain the home addresses of those drivers, even when they abuse the privilege given them.

On Bay Area toll bridges, the confidential-address toll runners get away with it two-thirds of the time: Only 9,050 of those 27,335 violations were collected, in large part because it often takes longer than 21 days to locate the vehicle owner, and state law requires that drivers be notified of their violations within that time period.

By contrast, authorities eventually collect toll infractions by motorists without confidential plates 60 percent of the time.

Rentschler noted the MTC loses about $10,000 a month in skipped tolls from confidential-address enrollees -- a fraction of the $600 million a year the agency collects on local bridges.

Costly to collect

Tracking the relatively few scofflaws is rather expensive, Rentschler said. While home addresses are not linked to the license plates, agencies do have access to information about car owners, including the agency they work for, which is the only way MTC can locate them.

Rentschler said the program also creates a significant public-perception problem: an abuse of privilege by those the state sought to protect.

"Public employees should be held to a higher standard," he said. "We ought to be careful not to abuse our privileges."

But even when a scofflaw is caught, MTC either waives its $25-per-violation fine or negotiates it down "modest amount" that covers the cost of locating the person at work, Rentschler said. "We just want to collect the tolls. We aren't in the business of being punitive."

But two-thirds of the time, the driver either doesn't get the citation or ignores it, records show.

"Say it is a teacher in the San Francisco schools," Rentschler said in a recent interview. (Although teachers aren't directly eligible for confidential plates, they may be the spouse of a person who is). "We send it to the district's main office. But the teacher may work in a school elsewhere in the city."

The citation then may not reach the person in the 21-day period for it to be valid, which makes it questionable whether the fine can be collected.

DMV won't weigh in

If the Department of Motor Vehicles has an official position on the confidential plate program, it's not being shared.

In two recent interviews, DMV representatives Jan Mendoza and Mike Marando wouldn't say whether the program needs legislative improvement or if it is obsolete. Their jobs are not to question why, they said.

"The department administers this program through the Vehicle Code, and that is what we're bound by," Marando said. "We cannot sponsor legislation, that's not our role, and we remain neutral on most legislation."

The DMV, however, didn't remain neutral on a recent bill that would have further given more people privileged plates. It opposed adding more job classifications to the program, stating that "given current protection afforded in law to everyone, such legislation is not necessary," according to an Assembly Appropriations Committee analysis. It also cautioned that adding job classifications would mean many more would want to get on the list in the future, and that the program is already costly and labor intensive.

But the DMV opposed another bill that would have required it to update the program's enrollment form to demand a specific work address for each driver, and would have required the drivers to keep the DMV updated when they move to a new work site. This bill would have placed "a significant burden on the department" to get and process all those addresses, the legislative analysis said.

Both bills died in committee, but even so, Mendoza said the department wouldn't comment on them.

Marando did say the department issued a memo in May reminding parking and toll agencies that when they encounter a violator with a confidential address, they should contact the headquarters of the agency at which the violator works, and that they could add the violation to a driver's vehicle registration record so the unpaid toll and/or fine must be paid when the car is registered again.

"This process was really created as a means to make it much more difficult to game the system," he said, although he acknowledged there's nothing new here -- the memo was "more of an educational procedure to reaffirm ... that this capability has been there."

Bay Bridge tops list

For the 18 months that Scofflaw No. 593 ran toll plazas, data show that almost all of the violations involved two bridges -- the Carquinez, where drivers pay a toll while headed east on Interstate 80, and the Bay Bridge, where motorists pay on the way west to San Francisco.

The driver passed through the Carquinez toll plaza on average about 7:30 a.m., according data obtained under the public records act.

The driver then passed through the Bay Bridge tolls later on the same day, often after 10 p.m., data show.

Most of the toll violations by confidential plate holders for the two-year period examined occurred on the Bay Bridge: 8,241, followed by the Benicia Bridge at 6,424 and the Carquinez at 6,281.

Data show that of the 109 drivers who ran tolls more than 50 times in the two-year period, most did it a majority of the time on a single bridge.

Scofflaw No. 4121, for example, drove across the Bay Bridge without paying 315 times and the San Mateo and Carquinez bridges once each, the data show.

Scofflaw No. 4198 ran the toll plaza at the Benicia Bridge 149 times, data show, but didn't cross any others without paying.

Police defend program

So who thinks the privilege of confidential plates should continue?

Police, for one.

"We need that other layer of protection," said Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a law enforcement lobbying group also known as PORAC.

Cottingham said the reasons for maintaining the confidential plate program are "still there, still valid." Although he acknowledged that other state laws were tightened so that people can't access home addresses through the DMV, "the people that operate the toll roads and the bridges and things like that can," he said.

Outlaw biker gangs, drug cartels and other forms of organized crime sometimes try to infiltrate government agencies, getting people to take jobs -- or bribing those already in those jobs -- in order to access information that isn't otherwise available, he said.

"It sounds bad; it sounds like we don't trust these other people," he said, but there have been cases of this in the past and the Peace Officers Research Association of California and other like-minded groups aren't willing to gamble with officers' safety.

Cottingham couldn't cite any specific examples of criminals obtaining officers' home addressees through motor vehicle records, but he offered a few general descriptions of instances in which public agencies were infiltrated or compromised by criminal elements: one, in which someone inside the San Diego County District Attorney's Office was informing suspects before search warrants could be executed on them, and another, in which a police department employee helped someone track down witnesses in a homicide case. He wouldn't say when and where that happened: "There's an ongoing investigation on that."

Solutions offered

Cottingham said he wouldn't oppose a tightening of the program to cut down on toll runners and other scofflaws. Perhaps agencies that employ people eligible for confidential plates should be required to maintain up-to-date databases of their employees' work addresses, he said.

"They should have the ability to search their records and say, 'That vehicle belongs to Corrections Officer Smith, send us a ticket, we'll get it to him and make sure he pays the fine,'" he said. "Maybe it's our responsibility to do that. I know some departments have done it."

He also said he wouldn't oppose a full review of the long list of job classifications now eligible for the confidential address program, which each constituency explaining its needs and concerns.

Rentschler of the MTC said he was confident that if the agency were allowed to obtain the home addresses of police officers and mail tickets to those places, it could protect the confidentially of the information the same way it does the data of all other motorists.

As more public employees push for the privilege, he said, it could be time to tighten the rules or do away with them altogether.

"There is no reason we can think of that we, a public agency, cannot treat all people the same with respect to collecting toll money. We protect everyone's privacy to the maximum extent," he said. "This is probably a place where we could make better law. Time has passed this by."

People eligible for confidential plates

* California attorney general
* State public defender
* State legislators
* Judges and court commissioners
* County district attorneys
* County public defenders
* Attorneys working for the state Justice Department, the office of the state public defender, or a county district attorney or public defender
* Active or retired peace officers
* Spouses and children of any of the above
* City attorneys and any attorney working for a city attorney who submits verification that he or she is routinely in personal contact with persons investigated for, charged with or convicted of crimes
* Nonsworn police dispatchers
* Child abuse investigators or social workers working in child protective services
* Most employees of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Division of Juvenile Facilities or the Prison Industry Authority
* Nonsworn employees of a city police department; a county sheriff's office; the California Highway Patrol; a federal, state or local detention facility; or a local juvenile hall, camp, ranch or home, who submits verification that he or she routinely controls or supervises inmates or is required to have a prisoner in his or her care or custody
* County counsels assigned to child abuse cases
* Investigators working for the state Justice Department, a county district attorney or a county public defender
* City council members
* County supervisors
* Federal prosecutors and criminal investigators
* Service rangers working in California
* Active or retired city parking enforcement officers
* Trial court employees
* County psychiatric social workers
* Police or sheriff's department workers designated by their chief or sheriff as "being in a sensitive position"
* DMV licensing registration examiners
* CHP motor carrier specialists
* Museum security officers and supervising museum security officers
* Spouses or children of any of the above, regardless of where the spouse or child lives
* Surviving spouses or children of peace officers who died in the line of duty, for three years after the officer's death

Contact

[BATN: See also:

Lawmaker vows bill to make public employees pay their traffic fines (9 Nov 10)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BATN/message/47047 ]

Comments:

Cheaters

I am referring to your front-page Dec. 12 article, “Incognito FasTrak outlaws.”

I can understand that Caltrans has decided it’s not worth the effort to try to track down a few hundred thousand dollars from bridge toll cheaters, but I wonder if it has considered that the less it tries to catch cheaters, the more cheaters there will be. Funny how that works.

But what upsets naive little me the most is the idea that a cop or a judge (a judge!), whose roles in society are to uphold the law, could be cheating the public this way. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that this is an example of the sort of thing that causes me to hate and despise some parts of our government.

Such scofflaws should not be charged a fraction of the toll they skipped out on, but an additional $25 fine per infraction. Multiply that 500 or 600 times and it might get their attention.

I also suggest that such disregard for the law, if repeated many times, should be considered “moral turpitude” and grounds for dismissal from their jobs.

Ralph Hueston Kratz

Richmond