There is a stack of about 60 arrest warrants in the Okotoks Municipal Enforcement office for people who haven’t paid for tickets.
Soon, that stack will no longer exist.
As of May 1, all unpaid municipal bylaw tickets will not go to warrant.
Instead people will have to pay them when their vehicle registration or driver’s licence renewal comes up.
Previously tickets with fines over $1,000 or deemed in the public interest required a court appearance if the fine was not paid by the due date. Tickets with fines under $1,000 were already tied to vehicle registration and driver’s licence renewals, forcing people to pay their tickets at the registry counter.
The changes come under proposed new provincial legislation – Bill 9, an act to modernize provincial offences.
“It eliminates the use of warrants to enforce tickets for overdue fines for minor non-traffic related offences,” said Alberta Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley. “Under the old system if you were charged with such an infraction, like neglecting to shovel your sidewalk or neglecting to pay your transit fare and then failed to attend court and pay the fine, a warrant would have issued for your arrest.
“In some cases, these situations would wind up with people being sent to jail. Our government believes that this kind of punishment is out of proportion to the seriousness of the offence.”
The move is also aimed at reducing time spent by police officers and court staff dealing with warrants for minor infractions.
There are an estimated 200,000 outstanding warrants in Alberta and around 45 per cent are for minor bylaw infractions, Ganley said. Court workers spend just under 9,000 hours per year processing warrants issued for tickets, she added.
Okotoks Municipal Enforcement manager Tim Stobbs said a very small number of the tickets it writes go to warrant status. He said municipal enforcement officers wrote 5,084 tickets in 2016 and they usually have around 60 at warrant status.
Stobbs said municipal enforcement officers call people with warrants out for their arrest for municipal bylaw tickets.
“They usually clear them up right away,” he said.
Municipal enforcement writes tickets for infractions against municipal bylaws, such as noise bylaws, dog-related infractions.
Stobbs expects a lot of the labour and paperwork will be eliminated now that minor tickets don’t require a court appearance and can’t be enforced with a warrant.
“I think it is going to be a great system,” he said. “If we can expedite the process, it will free up the court to spend time on more important things.”
Bill 9 will also expand the use of e-ticketing, an electronic method of producing roadside tickets that is currently being used for photo-radar tickets in Alberta.
Sgt. Sukh Randhawa with the Okotoks RCMP said they don’t have e-ticketing machines now and isn’t sure how or when they will have that technology.
Alberta RCMP assistant commissioner Martin Degrand said e-ticketing significantly cuts down on the time officers spend on issuing tickets and the subsequent paperwork.
“E-ticketing will reduce, as the minister stated, ticketing errors and will virtually eliminate police clerical work on tickets,” he said. “It can also help reduce a traffic stop to a third of the time it currently takes.”
