Nevada senators object to fiscal note on driver’s license reinstatement bill

Members of Senate Finance Committee took exception Thursday to the $6.8 million fiscal note the Department of Motor Vehicles put on a bill to eliminate driver’s license suspensions for failure to pay minor misdemeanor fines and fees.

DMV charges $75 to reinstate licenses for those people, which sponsor Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro, D-Las Vegas, argued causes major problems for people who can’t afford the fee. Potential impacts include the potential loss of a job because they can’t legally drive.

Finance Chairman Chris Brooks, D-Las Vegas, argued that if the court’s ability to suspend a driver’s license for failure to pay fines goes away, then the cost of reinstating the license would go away.

“My understanding is the work goes away, the fee goes away and therefore the expense goes away,” he said.

Cannizzaro said that is correct. She said the problem currently is that people have to drive so they get caught driving without a license and hit with more fines that compound their financial difficulties.

“Suspending the driver’s license realistically just results in more fines and fees being assessed,” she said.

The bill would retroactively reinstate driver’s licenses for those currently suspended. The committee put $14,950 in funding in the bill to cover the cost of notifying people their licenses are being reinstated.

Asked how violators could be held accountable if their licenses can’t be touched, Cannizzaro said there are many ways to do that including ordering community service or counseling in cases where that makes sense.

The committee was also told that the reinstatement fee goes into the Highway Fund, not the DMV budget and that the Highway Fund is currently projected to have more than $200 million in unobligated cash in each year of the upcoming biennium that could be used to cover the cost of retroactively restoring licenses to those currently on suspension for minor charges.

The committee voted to amend and pass SB219.