SEQUIM — Instead of having to drive to Port Angeles to deal with a traffic ticket or testify in a trial, you could have a judge from Forks come to hear you out.
Judge-sharing with the West End town, Sequim City Attorney Craig Ritchie says, is one way Sequim could deliver justice faster and with less fuel consumption.
For more than a year now, Sequim city officials have sought a way to relieve residents of traveling to the Clallam County Courthouse some 25 miles away. As Sequim grows, more speeders, red-light runners and criminal offenders are sent to District Court in Port Angeles: The traffic ticket caseload, for example, went from a mere 218 in 2005 to 1,266 two years later.
In 2008, infractions totaled 1,298, according to the annual report Sequim Police Chief Robert Spinks is in the process of compiling.
A slight dip, however, occurred in both traffic tickets and criminal cases during early 2009. During January, only 34 traffic infractions and 40 criminal cases came in from Sequim, said District I Court Administrator Keith Wills. That was down from 70 tickets and 52 criminal cases during December.
“Our cases in general have been down,” Wills said, adding that this year’s cold and storms might be a factor.
But Spinks isn’t ready to agree.
The caseload “may be down based on the very poor weather,” he said, “as well as the fact that we had to absorb most of our dedicated traffic time back into patrol to cover just the basic call load of the community.”
The chief noted that Sequim’s 2009 budget funds two fewer officers than in 2008. “But we haven’t drilled down into the data to confirm if that is really the cause” of the decrease in court filings.
Spinks is in favor of establishing a court of Sequim’s own, so witnesses, officers, domestic-violence survivors seeking restraining orders and others no longer have to make the trip to Port Angeles.
Last year his executive assistant, Marci Protze, wrote a strategic outline for a Sequim court and presented it to the City Council, which in turn allocated $45,000 in the 2009 budget for court startup costs.
Protze has since moved away, and Ritchie has picked up the court ball. He said $45,000 is enough to pay a part-time clerk and buy some computers, furniture and partitions to turn the Transit Center at 190 W. Cedar St. — also the City Council chambers — into a courtroom.
But while a Sequim court could save gasoline and time for thousands of people, Ritchie said it won’t save the city money.
A judge-sharing arrangement, however, could increase efficiency across Clallam County. District II Judge Erik Rohrer, who works three days a week in Forks, could perhaps come east a couple of days a week, Ritchie said. He’ll consult with the Washington state court administrator before moving forward with such a plan.
Setup of a court in Sequim could be more than a year away, Ritchie added. In the meantime, the Forks judge may be able to help relieve Sequim’s caseload by issuing restraining orders by telephone.
“You can be sworn under oath by phone,” Ritchie said.
The District Court in Port Angeles cannot start handling such cases over the phone, he added, because it’s “overburdened.”
That’s due in part to the number of traffic citations and misdemeanor cases flowing from Sequim. The per-capita rate of speeding tickets and other infractions here exceeds Port Angeles’, Wills has reported.
From January 2008 through August — one of the busier months for speeding in Sequim — officers issued 1,070 traffic citations. In Port Angeles, whose population of 18,789 is well over three times Sequim’s, officers wrote 1,313 tickets.
If Sequim establishes its own municipal court, it’ll no longer pay District Court filing fees, which amounted to some $81,000 last year. The fees rose 3.5 percent in 2009, Wills added, to $21.28 per civil case and $70.95 per criminal case.
On the other hand, the city will collect penalties and fines — such as $154 for many speeding tickets — though it will still have to send a portion to the state. Of the $154 ticket, for example, $91.44 goes to Olympia.
Ritchie reiterated that a Sequim courtroom brings convenience, not cash, to this city.
“It lets people pay their tickets here. There’s an awful lot of people who do not have checking accounts, and the courts don’t accept personal checks anyway. We would probably start doing credit cards,” he said. “You could pay your speeding ticket and get air miles.”
Ritchie added that he’ll give the Sequim City Council an update on progress toward the court in the next few months.
City Finance Director Karen Goschen said the council can then decide whether it wants to spend the $45,000 in this year’s budget on startup costs.
Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
