CA Police Commission mulls merits of joint municipal court
By Neal Hogden
The Colby-Abbotsford Police Commission discussed the merits of rerouting all citations written in the city of Colby to the Abbotsford Municipal Court.
Currently, citations for traffic incidents in Colby are sent to Marathon or Clark County Circuit Courts. Police Chief Alex Bowman said Colby is currently the last municipality to send its traffic citations through the Marathon County Circuit Court. He said other municipalities have combined municipal courts that allow them to keep traffic citations out of the Marathon or Clark County courts. For example, Bowman said municipalities like Marathon and Edgar send their citations through the Rothschild Municipal Court.
Bowman told the commission that not only would sending traffic citations through the Abbotsford Municipal Court be more cost effective for the city of Colby, but it would also help his officers when filling out said citations because they wouldn’t be trying to decide where they needed to go.
The current system requires Bowman to send officers to Marathon and Clark county courts to represent the department during traffic court. He said the department would not be required to send an officer to municipal court unless someone wanted to contest a citation which would save time and money for the department.
On the financial side, Bowman said the Abbotsford Municipal Court brought in $44,791.20 from 572 citations the court handled. In comparison, Colby generated $12,982.32 in revenue from its 291 citations. With about half the citations of Abbotsford, Colby generated about 29 percent of the revenue that Abbotsford did. Bowman said Colby should be generating nearly $10,000 more in revenue by sending their citations through municipal court.
The city would incur some costs to start, as it would have to adjust its ordinances to reflect Abbotsford Municipal Court as the judicial entity for Colby traffic citations.
Bowman said he had spoken to Abbotsford Municipal Judge Judy Kalepp and she was on board with the added workload it might bring. He said he also spoke to the police department clerk, Jessica Weich and figured out how an increase in wages to offset the extra workload might look.
Bowman said Weich and Kalepp would need about a 33 percent increase in their
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wage if they were to be handling the Colby citations in the future. Currently, Weich is paid $4,200 per year by the city of Abbotsford to handle their municipal court citations. Kalepp is paid $3,000 per year for her role as judge. With the proposed wage increases, Weich would make around $5,500 per year and Kalepp would earn $4,000 per year with the increases being paid by the city of Colby.
In summary, Bowman said sending Colby citations through the Abbotsford Municipal Court would save money for the police department, save the city of Colby money, simplify the citation-writing process for officers and would ultimately not cost the city of Abbotsford any additional money. Bowman said he would need to talk to Abbotsford City Clerk Linda Filtzkowski about the proposal to see what it would look like on her end but he was confident it wouldn’t be an issue.
Commissioner Mason Rachu of Abbotsford said he didn’t see an issue from Abbotsford’s side of things and supported moving forward with the proposal as long as Filtzkowski was consulted first.
The commission decided they did not need to make a motion regarding the matter but everyone was in agreement that they were on board with the proposal. Both cities will be discussing the measure in upcoming city council meetings.
