County moves to paperless tickets

DINWIDDIE — The county is hoping to make the days of paper summons a thing of the past.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously passed an ordinance to impose an additional $5 fee on criminal and traffic cases in order to raise money for an electronic summonsing system. The fee will go into effect Aug. 1.

“These $5 would go into a special fund with the treasurer. They’ll hold the funds in a special earmark. When it gets to be enough, the idea is for the county to purchase an e-summons system,” said Tyler Southall, county attorney.

The county currently uses paper summons for traffic and criminal cases.

“Right now we’re using the five-part paper summons. We order 5,000 summons at a time several times a year,” said Maj. William Knott with the Sheriff’s Office.

The main benefit of the e-summons system, Knott and Southall said, would be for officer safety.

“If the deputy pulls someone over on the interstate, cars are flying by and that’s dangerous. This system reduces the amount of time that they’re both pulled over on the side of the road,” Southall said.

Knott added that the state code would still require officers to carry a hard copy backup to the driver and get their signature. However, he said it would still be a minimum of two trips.

“If you’re writing a summons, you’re concentrating on it and not the vehicle or maybe your surroundings as much as you would if you could just swipe, make a couple keystrokes and hit print. You keep your attention focused on the vehicle you have stopped or traffic around you,” Knott said.

He added that the e-summonsing system would be beneficial to the entire law enforcement unit of the county by making things more efficient.

“It takes the handwriting part out of the equation, everything is electronically submitted to the General District Court.,” he said.

At this point, Knott said the county law enforcement has not chosen a vendor for the e-summonsing system. Once they get to the point where they’re ready to purchase the hardware, he said they’ll put it out to bid and see which product suits the county best.

“E-summonsing has been around for a while. It’s not something that’s new,” Knott said. “The biggest problem was that smaller agencies and jurisdictions didn’t have the funds to implement it, this [$5 fee] is a way for these agencies to fund it. It’s not something that comes out of taxpayers pockets.”

• Amir Vera may be reached at avera@progress-index.com or (804) 722-5155.