How would drivers in Dallas react to an accident response fee

According to a story today in today's New York Times, municipal and state governments are resorting to instituting and/or raising fees, not taxes, as a way to offset budget deficits. I know City Manager Mary Suhm has looked at various creative fees along these same lines.

But one, according to the story, that's getting a lot of traction is a traffic accident response fee that's charged to the driver who's judged to have caused the accident. The theory behind the fee, which is a sound one to my way of thinking, is that the burden for the cost of fire department and police department response to accidents should not be shared by all the taxpayers, but only by the person responsible for the accident. That sounds great, I guess, until you get that $300 bill from the city for responding to your traffic accident.

Some cities have gone as far as hiring a company like Cost Recovery Corporation out of Dayton, Ohio, which, for 10 percent of every bill, sets up the collection systems. Some, however, want 100 percent of the fees, so they opt to handle collections themselves. In places like Winter Haven, Fla., that hasn't worked so well. It has collected only about $6,400 of the $32,000 it billed at-fault drivers.

“We chose not to contract out the collection part of this, and frankly, because of staff cuts, we don’t have enough people to handle all the paperwork,” says Joy Townsend, the city’s communications officer. “We’re now evaluating how cost-effective this program is.”

It sounded like a good idea at the time.