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BY MAE SINGUAY
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Thursday, April 20, 2017
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BACOLOD City – Traffic policy violators are making the city government “rich.”
City hall collected around P1.5 million in fines from December 2016 to March 2017, according to Councilor Dindo Ramos.
Ramos, chairman of the Sangguniang Panlungsod transportation committee, considers putting up a trust fund out of the collected fines.
The city government is able to collect this much because of the ordinance granting Bacolod Traffic Authhttp://www.panaynews.net/wp-admin/post-new.php#saveority Office (BTAO) enforcers the authority to confiscate the driver’s licenses of erring motorists, he said.
City Ordinance No. 09-16-790 allows local traffic enforcers to seize driver’s licenses and issue citation tickets.
Before this local law was passed, traffic policy violators the BTAO would catch will be sent to the Land Transportation Office (LTO) where they will be issued a temporary operator’s permit (TOP).
“If ever they (BTAO enforcers) had TOPs (with them), the fine that the violators they catch will pay will go to the LTO, not the city government,” said Ramos.
The citation tickets indicate that the erring driver must surrender their license to the BTAO enforcer who caught them, the traffic office head Superintendent Luisito Acebuche said in a previous interview.
An erring driver who refuses to turn over their license faces a fine of P500 or a five- to 10-day imprisonment, or both, the ordinance stated.
The citation ticket shall serve as the erring driver’s temporary license. They may claim their original license from the BTAO upon paying the fine within three days from the issuance of the citation ticket.
The ordinance was deemed controversial, what with Republic Act 4136, or the Land Transportation and Traffic Code, authorizing only law enforcers deputized by the LTO to confiscate driver’s licenses.
But City Legal Office head Joselito Bayatan said an ordinance “always enjoys the presumption of validity unless challenged in court.”
“It is an act of legislation. We have to follow [it] because a city ordinance is a (local) law,” Bayatan previously said. “If somebody questions its validity for whatever ground, we are ready to defend it.”
Ramos plans to propose an ordinance putting the collected fines in a trust fund.
Eighty percent of the total amount shall be used for “traffic development,” or the needs of BTAO, and 20 percent for social projects for drivers, he said.
Ramos said the trust fund will ensure that the collected fines will be used exclusively for traffic-related projects and programs.
Without it, the fines will go to the city government’s general fund without an assurance that they will be used for their planned purpose, he said./PN
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