Yes, suspending driver’s licenses for unpaid debt is ‘absurd’: James Levin

Updated: Mar. 13, 2024, 5:56 a.m.
Published: Mar. 13, 2024, 5:36 a.m.
By Guest Columnist, cleveland.com

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CLEVELAND -- “Absurd” was the adjective used by Judge Kristin Boggs of the 10th Ohio District Court of Appeals in Columbus to describe the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ refusal to restore an individual’s driver’s license. On Jan. 25, a unanimous three-judge appellate panel remanded the case back to Franklin County Common Pleas Court for further proceedings.

The license in question was suspended in 2005 for failure to pay a judgment to Nationwide Insurance, but it wasn’t the age of this debt that swayed the court. Rather, it was that Nationwide had long since stopped trying to collect the debt – effectively declaring it dormant. So there was no legal obligation to pay a “dormant” debt. The BMV was wrong when it refused to restore the plaintiff’s license.

What’s even more absurd than the BMV’s position in this one case is the number of Ohioans who are harmed by using license suspension as a tool to collect unpaid fees and fines. That’s why many states have stopped doing it.

According to the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland in a 2022 study, 60% of suspended licenses in Ohio have nothing to do with dangerous driving. They are debt-related: failure to pay money owed to a court, to the Ohio BMV, or to a private third party (like Nationwide). The average amount of debt rung up was staggering at more than $900 million a year.

Debt-related suspensions disproportionately disadvantage poor and minority communities, where the ability to pay fines and fees is severely limited. In Cleveland’s ZIP code 44104, which covers parts of the Central, Kinsman, Woodland Hills and Fairfax neighborhoods near Opportunity Corridor, for example, 53% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the Cleveland Legal Aid study. Imagine not having a license when you need groceries, diapers, or medicine. You don’t have to imagine the impact of the current policy on Clevelanders who live there. That neighborhood has as many license suspensions as driving-age residents.

Debt-related driver’s license suspensions also harm Ohio’s economy. Revoking thousands of licenses limits access to good jobs at companies that are hungry for workers. It puts Ohioans who are already employed “at risk” – one traffic stop away from losing their license, and with it, the ability to travel to their job.

Nor does the policy make fiscal sense. Although it is difficult to know just how much Ohio municipalities and clerks of courts are collecting, a recent report from the Vera Institute of Justice suggests that the percentage is low. In Washington state, for instance, the government received payments for only 5.1% of all imposed court debt over a three-year period. Another study cited by the Vera Institute of the cost of collecting in Florida, New Mexico and Texas found that these states spent 41 cents on every dollar brought in.

A Dec. 3, 2023, Plain Dealer/cleveland.com editorial urged passage of Senate Bill 37 as a needed step to help resolve what it described as a “nightmarish Catch 22 system.” Ohioans should support SB 37, currently in the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill would limit driver’s license suspensions to those convictions related to dangerous driving, eliminating the government’s authority to revoke, suspend, or refuse to renew a person’s license for failure to pay court fines and fees when the offense does not carry a possible jail sentence.