They say a budget crisis often forces government to embrace innovative and streamlined procedures that would be good ideas even in the best of times. And that may be the case. But it is equally true that a budget crisis sometimes prods government into adopting policies that make life a little bit more annoying and burdensome without improving the delivery of services.
Take Denver’s plan to charge non-residents for accidents on state highways within its borders — corridors such as Colorado Boulevard and part of Hampden Avenue. The mayor’s 2010 budget summary estimates that these accident fees will raise $1.13 million annually, although they aren’t yet in place and probably won’t be for a few more months.
Don’t expect an 11th-hour reprieve, however. The City Council already has approved them and even its most fiscally conservative member is reluctant to criticize the idea.
“It wasn’t my favorite proposal, but it’s acceptable,” Jeanne Faatz told me. “I’m willing to try it.”
Besides, she reasons, “few people will be paying out of pocket” because insurance companies will end up footing the bills. Or at least that’s what council members were told.
Faatz may be right about who will pay when transportation to a hospital is required, since many insurance policies cover such charges. But how would you like to receive a bill, say, for several hundred dollars when you weren’t injured and your car wasn’t even towed? That’s a scenario already playing out in a few Colorado jurisdictions.
Good luck getting your insurance company to pay up.
“We’re talking about a non-medical response — people who never received any transport but who still receive a bill,” explains Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. Walker isn’t sure how many fire departments in the state already charge accident-response fees, but she worries that Denver, because of its size, could open the floodgates.
“Part of what we’d like cities to understand is that this isn’t the revenue source they think it will be,” Walker added. “As these fees become more common, insurance companies will exclude them. Cities will not be able to collect all of the expected revenues.”
Even if the insurance companies do meekly cough up the fees, the result will surely be higher premiums for the rest of us.
Collecting fees from individual motorists offers its own set of challenges. Some people won’t be able to afford them, and many others will bridle at the idea.
After all, they already pay taxes for emergency services and so naturally assume those services are fully reciprocal — because historically they have been. Enacting accident fees is akin to breaching an unwritten social contract that has kept our lives free of yet one more unnecessary hassle.
We drive the highways assuming we will be treated the same wherever we go. Accident fees fracture that sense of a larger community.
And let’s face it: They’re also akin to a new tax — although one of those beggar-thy-neighbor levies in which the people being targeted can’t even vote those who enacted the policy out of office.
At least Denver is planning to limit its fees to non-residents found at fault in accidents, but even this is not as simple as it sounds. Not every accident is the result of recklessness or negligence. You can slide on a patch of ice you had no way of seeing and plow into a parked car. But fair or not, it will still officially be your fault.
Colorado is one of many states in which some anxious local officials have settled upon accident fees as a way to boost their budgets. The fees have become so common, in fact, that a number of states have actually banned them.
They should be banned in this state, too. Otherwise, now that Denver has taken the plunge, they will become so commonplace that we will never be able to repeal them.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
