Can municipal court fees be more equitable? New grant could help Pueblo find out

City court fees sometimes pose an undue burden on people in poverty, according to the National League of Cities.  

To gauge the impact of those fees locally, Pueblo has been selected for an NLC grant program to evaluate fairness in court fees and potentially offer financial literacy classes to people convicted of municipal offenses.

That doesn’t mean that people could walk away without accountability, Pueblo Municipal Judge Carla Sikes told the Chieftain.

“Our whole goal is to deter crime and prevent crime from happening,” Sikes said. “A consequence that may be meaningful to one person is not going to be the same consequence that can be meaningful to someone else.”

Sikes said that people sometimes have the chance to work off some fines with community service because they might not be able to pay them. In other situations when people have the cash to pay the fine, Sikes said she often mandates community service.

“Otherwise, there's no consequence: either that person has enough money where they just pay all the fines and they keep doing the behavior, so you need to find something else to cause them to pause, or they don't have the money to pay the fines,” Sikes said.

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The initial phase of the grant will help the city of Pueblo analyze data on municipal court convictions and identify patterns. The first chunk of the grant is $10,000, but there will be follow-up grants available through the program, Sikes said.

Pueblo will focus on general offense tickets, which include municipal offenses such as disorderly conduct, littering and stealing less than $2,000 worth of merchandise. Sikes said that fines for these offenses often are left unpaid and sent to collections agencies.

The NLC program could also help the city develop more financial literacy classes for people going through the court system.

“The goal is then to financially empower people by providing them resources to help them budget and to better their circumstances so that they are better able to pay these fines and fees along with all of their other obligations,” Sikes said.

Pueblo was chosen this year along with Dallas, Las Vegas, St. Louis, Washington D.C., Chicago suburb Maywood, Illinois, and the Alabama cities of Birmingham and Montgomery.

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Sikes said she found out more about the program from speaking with municipal judges in Aurora, the only other Colorado city that's participated in the NLC grant program. She also joined a discussion with municipal judges from some of the cities recently selected for the grant.

Many of the municipal judges spoke about the difficulty of balancing ways to hold people accountable without disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable people in the community; the consequences have to be meaningful for the individuals, Sikes said.

Solutions are also different for each place, she said.

City code establishes that fines for municipal offenses are up to $1,000. Class 1 municipal offenses, such as harassment and battery, entail a fine and/or up to 364 days in jail.

Pueblo collected approximately $864,000 from municipal court fines in 2022, according to its budget.

Anna Lynn Winfrey covers politics for the Chieftain. She can be reached at awinfrey@gannett.com or on Twitter, @annalynnfrey.