City Contract with American Municipal Services

At the last City Council meeting (Aug. 20), I noted:
Next on the agenda was a request to enter into a contract with American Municipal Services to collect past due court fines.  Harriette Nitzel said “we have a lot of them.”  Several city councilpersons questioned why these fines had not been collected or “why aren’t they in jail?”  Ms. Nitzel said that her office issues warrants and files for driver’s license suspension with DPS, but that there are still a lot of uncollected fines.  She said they would be collected by AMS at no cost to the City [emphasis added].  When questioned further, Ms. Nitzel indicated that information on the service and their fees  was in each councilperson’s packet; however, none of the councilmen had it.  She then passed a copy of information from AMS to Richard Hightower.  Ms. Nitzel  said that AMS’s fee is 35% of the fine, but that AMS adds that fee to the fine they collect so that it doesn’t come out of the City’s portion.  “We get the entire fine they collect” she said.  The council voted to approve entering into a contract with AMS (with no details of the contract being in the Motion).  Richard Hightower stated that his affirmative vote was in spite of not having the full information in front of the council, and asked that “this not happen again.”

[ed. note:  Since the actual terms of an agreement with AMS was not provided to the Council, and approved by the Council, the terms  of any agreement were not approved by the Council and should be presented at another Council meeting for such approval prior to the City representatives executing the agreement.  Citizens should attend City Council meetings in order to know what our City government is doing -- it affects YOU!!] 

[My next posting will be a summary of an article that appeared in the Oklahoman about Code Enforcement in OKC (Aug. 18) and how it applies to our community.
Thank you all for the messages of support for this blog and your desire to be informed!  /Linda]