A state appeals court has upheld a ruling that says administrative fees assessed by the North Texas Tollway Authority for failure to pay its tolls are legal.The administrative fees are assessed when drivers don’t pay their bills by the due date, but they can rapidly swell to, in some cases, hundreds or even thousands of dollars.In April 2010, four drivers sued the NTTA, claiming the agency’s administrative fees were excessive and unconstitutional, according to court records. Last year, Senior District Judge A. Joe Fish ruled against the drivers.The 5th Court of Appeals upheld that ruling Tuesday. Attorneys representing the drivers in the case could not be reached for comment.The drivers had argued that the fees are excessive, noting one example where a driver who used the road 153 times soon racked up fees of $3,800 for failing to pay $139 in tolls in a timely manner.But in the appellate ruling, Circuit Judge Gregg Costa wrote that as “gated toll booths are becoming a thing of the past” NTTA needed to charge higher administrative fees to move to the automated TollTag system and, in some cases, to track down drivers who didn’t pay their tolls.According to court records, before NTTA switched over to unmanned toll booths, administrative fees were $10 for not paying a toll at a checkpoint.After the switch, NTTA “determined that the old $10 administrative fee was insufficient to cover costs incurred in installing new cameras and the increase in drivers who would refuse to pay.”So, according to the records, NTTA decided to increase the administrative fee to $25 after the third notice. But that’s per toll, so the fee could be higher if, for example, a driver drives through several checkpoints.“The fees are broadly imposed: Any driver who uses the toll road and shirks payment is subject to them,” Costa wrote, “As the more than $1 billion in uncollected fees indicates, there are usually hundreds of such people every day.”In his ruling, Costa noted that NTTA offered drivers ways to get out of paying increased costs, through paying prior to 30 days of receiving an invoice, or opening a TollTag account, which would drop the administrative fee from $25 to $8.33 a toll.Fish’s original, lower-court ruling said that NTTA has a “legitimate government interest in recoup its collection costs and in switching drivers to TollTag accounts, and its decision to assess a $25 (and later an $8.33) administrative fee, while not necessarily politic or a proper interpretation of the statute, was rationally related to those interests.”The drivers said that they should not be forced to purchase a TollTag because of administrative fees.“But no one is being forced to use the toll roads or any particular payment system,” Costa wrote. “In a pre-ZipCash world, drivers without TollTags or change in their car could not use the toll roads. Now they can. They just have to pay like everyone else, but are given the convenience of paying after usage.”Costa also noted that the agency had customer service representatives available who can reduce or excuse fees. But, for those drivers who still refused to pay, NTTA would forward their invoice to a collections agency. If that was still unsuccessful, the account could be forwarded to the Texas Department of Public Safety.“As expected, the cashless system led to more drivers using the toll roads,” Costa wrote in his ruling. “Also as expected, many of them never paid after receiving the bill. This left [NTTA] on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in unpaid tolls.”Costa also noted that NTTA was spending more money trying to collect unpaid costs than it was actually collecting, something the district court had said proved there was a “rational relationship” between the $25 administrative fee and NTTA’s interest in recovering costs spent trying to collect unpaid tolls.“Far from a massive windfall, [NTTA] has only recovered around $42 million in administrative fees, which is about $10 million less than what it spent to collect that amount,” Costa wrote. Citing recent changes in the Texas Legislature that limits the amount of administrative fees NTTA can levy, Costa noted that while NTTA’s use of the ZipCash system, and the cost of the administrative fee, may be imperfect policies, it doesn’t violate the constitution.“The political process may continue to fine tune toll collection, but that is not the Due Process Clause’s role to play,” he said. Continue reading...
Should Exploding Tollway Fees Be Legal? Courts Say ‘yes'
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