The Jacksonville City Council is taking necessary steps to clean up some concerns with open accounts on Monday.
The City Council approved write offs on collection accounts 7 years or older. City Attorney Dan Beard explained that some of the old city ordinance fines will never be collected because some of the debts were paid via community service by the offenders, or are simply unable to be collected due to constant non-compliance dating back many years.
Beard says that some of the names in non-compliance on the collection accounts are currently names in the circuit court system who also have back due fines and fees. He told the council that the circuit court has similar problems in collecting the money they are owed.
Beard says he was also made aware of a recent state law signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker in 2021: “We have a lot of uncollected accounts receivable that were the result of fines over the past 15-18 years in our municipal court system. In 2021, the state legislature passed a statute that established for the first time a statute of limitations on the collection of those accounts, setting the statute of limitations at 7 years. If they are older than that, you cannot proceed with collection efforts. As a result of that [law] and upon the strong advice of our accountant that we need to get those off the books if we’re not going to collect them, they should not be shown as an account receivable. I advised and the council agreed to write off any fines from the municipal court system that are older than 7 years.”
Beard says that no one will have to do anything to have the accounts written off. Zumbahlen, Eyth, Surratt, Foote, & Flynn Auditor Adam Withee had made the recommendation to fix the backlog of uncollected fines to the city council the last two years during his annual audit presentation to the city.