Say you and your friend both get a parking ticket. Your annual income is about one-and-a-half times greater than your friend’s. When you look at the fines you both get, you need to pay more money for the infraction than your friend does.
A “sliding scale” fine system like in that scenario could be coming to New York City.
On Thursday, Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brennan introduced a bill to the City Council that would launch a pilot program of means-based financial penalties for civil transgressions.
“Instead of bankrupting working people while winking at the rich by setting the same fines for everyone, fines should be high enough to discourage people from breaking laws that endanger or inconvenience our neighbors but low enough that they don’t arbitrarily upend anyone’s life,” Brannan said, according to the Daily News.
A comprehensive list of what would be applicable to this program has not been offered by Brennan, though he did mention double-parking as an example.
“Why should the guy who double-parked his 1988 Toyota pay the same as the guy with the 2024 Bentley?” Brannan told the Daily News.
If the bill is successfully passed, the New York City Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings would be in charge of applying this new system. This methodology of tying fines to income is similar to what exists in Europe.
“What they do in Europe right now is basically they have the technology where, the same way they have a digital machine that puts in your information, they can look up your tax receipts and know what your income is,” Brannan said.
Proponents of the bill say that scaling the fees would encourage more people to pay.
“It scales it according to a person’s ability to pay, which we don’t have a current model for,” said Antonya Jeffrey, state director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “A $75 fine can mean going without really basic needs for one person and could just be a drop in the bucket for another.”
