Dying to fill the coffers

Robert Hudson may well have died so the city of New York could collect a fine from his wife for neglecting to wear her seatbelt. Maybe.

If the account presented by his widow’s attorney is true, Hudson was victimized by New York’s desperate search for revenues to compensate for the money it has lost over the years. New York’s practice reflects the efforts of other cities and states to raise money.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has transformed this process into an art form, but it occurs in plenty of other places, especially in large cities and populous states. For decades, taxpayers in major cities and populous states have been filling up the bulk of state and federal treasuries to the point that cities and states cannot support themselves.

To break this out, the federal government receives much more money from large states than elsewhere because that’s where the money is. Not only do we have a greater number of citizens to pay taxes in these states but a high percentage of the wealthy live in places like Beverly Hills, Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Fairfield County in Connecticut.

Not to mention suburbs like Newton in Massachusetts, Bethesda in Maryland, Lower Merion in Pennsylvania and Teaneck and Cherry Hill in New Jersey.

Likewise, these cities and wealthier communities stuff the coffers of state governments in higher proportions. The statehouses in Albany, Springfield and Sacramento stay in business largely thanks to downstate New York, Chicago and vicinity and Los Angeles County.

A recent study reveals that of 67 counties Pennsylvania derives 10 percent of its sales tax revenues from a single county, Philadelphia, where the largest number of and most expensive hotels are located. The combined population of Philadelphia and its four suburban counties amounts to 31 percent, yet their tax revenues to the state account for more than 37 percent.

What kind of money does that leave for a city or a county, or a state? When they are in trouble, they must find ways to compensate. Often, the methods are outlandish and extreme, maybe enough to induce a fatal heart attack.

An account in The New York Daily News reported that Robert Hudson, 72, drove his wife Doris, also 72, to a Queens Village pharmacy on Jan. 14 so she could obtain medicine and she took her seat belt off.

Two police officers arrived, accused her of not wearing the belt and told her she would receive a summons, but she had no identification with her.

Hudson’s attorney, Bonita Zelman, told a Daily News reporter that police prohibited her husband from driving home to get the identification, so instead he spent 45 minutes walking home a half-mile back and forth.

While he was gone, Mrs. Hudson obtained her medicine and the officers wrote her a summons on the basis of her name and address from the prescription, the News reported.

The Hudsons subsequently returned to the car and drove off. After driving a block or more, Robert Hudson collapsed behind the wheel and later died at Franklin Hospital.

“There was no reason not to let him drive home,” Zelman raged. “He wasn’t the one getting the summons. Instead, they had him walk home. He tried to walk as fast as he could, but he’s 72 years old and some of the walk is uphill.”

Mrs. Hudson disputed police claims that the officers were willing to write the summons without inconveniencing Mr. Hudson.

The News quoted an unidentified police official who said the officers “showed poor judgment.”

Reading between the lines, if Mrs. Hudson’s story is true, the officers were probably under merciless pressure to return to the police station with a stack of tickets that would generate wads of cash for the city.

Police officers elsewhere in New York have complained about being forced to make quotas, and this is typical of many local and state governments, and they do this with agencies other than police departments.

The Hudson episode would be an extreme example of how New York gropes for new money, but it is no isolated incident. A few years ago, some women were each fined $250 for wading into the ocean at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn after 7 p.m. Even if they violated the law, why were the fines so steep?

Not only members of City Council but also state legislators fumed over a plan for the fire department to charge at-fault motorists $365 and $490 for any kind of car accident with the intention of raising $1 million yearly, a tiny fraction of the department’s $60 million budget gap.

“This cracks open a door that if we don’t close now, they’ll kick open and start charging fees for 911 or garbage pickup,” state Sen. Eric Adams of Brooklyn told a Daily News reporter.

Added Councilman Peter Vallone of the Astoria section of Queens: “Firefighters are supposed to provide help, not assess damage and who is to blame. They are simply not set up to be judge and jury at the scene.”

More than 3.2 million parking tickets were contested in 2010, 15 percent higher than those contested the year before, stated the 2010 Mayor’s Management Report, according to the News. More than $600 million from parking tickets were collected by the Finance Department in 2010.

Personal experience prompted state Assemblyman Michael DenDekker, a Queens Democrat, to introduced a revised bill requiring all municipalities in the state to pay $100 to motorists who are falsely ticketed. His 74-year-old mother was ticketed for violating New York’s alternate-side parking rule in August 2010.

She received the ticket on a Thursday, but the regulation is only in effect on Wednesdays. She sent the Department of finance a copy of the ticket and pictures of the street sign. Not enough. The city notified her in January that she must provide more photos of the street sign.

“We need to hold government accountable for these frivolous tickets written to innocent people,” her son told a News reporter. “When someone does nothing wrong and they have to prove themselves, they should be reimbursed for their time and effort.”

One fascinating example of a city likely trying to save money - New York again - was exposed when the U.S. Department of Justice sued NYC in mid-January, 2011, charging that it overbilled Medicaid by “by at least tens of millions of dollars” when it improperly authorized 24-hour home care for thousands of patients.

“The allegations here are serious and unfortunately reflect a systemic failure to responsibly administer the Medicaid program,” said U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Preet Bharara in a statement.

As The New York Times reported, the federal complaint points out that the city avoided expenses for more appropriate programs by enrolling patients in the Personal Care Services program. Until 2006, the city had to share the cost with the state and federal governments, but after that year NYC was spared paying for it.

The complaint alleges that the city either enrolled patients who did not need the services or approved in-home care for patients who needed more intensive services such as nursing home care. The city would have been mandated to share the cost of a nursing home.

The suit said the city placed patients in personal care “even though certain patients were ineligible to receive such services and should have received services through a different program. The city has been unjustly enriched by this practice because, since January 1, 2006, the P.C.S. program is not funded by the city, whereas alternative programs are.”

Let’s lay off NYC and move across the Hudson River where New Jersey Transit inflated its fares 50 percent. Actually, Gov. Chris Christie will tell you that single-ticket fares only rose 25 percent. However, discounted round-trip tickets were eliminated simultaneously.

A $21.50 round-trip ticket between Trenton and Manhattan ballooned to $31 on May 1, 2010.

New Jersey’s school aid cuts had a strange downhill impact. Christie axed state aid to the schools by $1 billion to contend with the state’s $11 billion budget gap.

After losing $1.5 million from the state, Haddonfield’s school district initiated a campaign to attract tuition-paying students from outside the district for 10 students per grade between sixth and 10th grades, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“The primary reason is to raise revenue because of the loss of state aid,” Superintendent Richard Perry told an Inquirer reporter.

School officials in the Los Angeles United School District - second largest district in America - hope to raise up to $18 million by seeking corporate sponsorships to make a dent in budget cuts. In November, 2010, 1,000 employees were let go in a new round of layoffs, the New York Times reported.

School board members who approved the corporate sponsorship program in December found the move distasteful. “The reality is public funding is not funding public education,” Steve Zimmer told the Times.

Smaller school districts have been permitting naming rights for their stadiums for a long time, but Los Angeles is the biggest district to take this step.

The D.C. Council in Washington considered a bill in December to force homeless families to prove they reside in Washington before they can be admitted to a shelter, according to The Washington Post. Council members argued during a meeting that the homeless shelters are frequently overwhelmed.

“We cannot be the hotel for Virginia and Maryland residents,” said bill co-sponsor Tommy Wells, a Democrat.

Mary M Cheh, also a Democrat, said as quoted in the Post, “I think in its various applications it’s going to be cruel.”

The governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia seek to eliminate or curtail the states’ decades-old state liquor store system. Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania campaigned on abolishing the state-store operation and selling licenses to private companies.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell in mid-January 2011 proposed replacing 332 state-owned stores with 1,000 private retail outlets to acquire $200 million from the sale of liquor licenses and $13.1 million more than it currently collects each year in profits and taxes at Alcoholic Beverage Control stores, according to The Washington Post.

Back in NYC, the city could pull in $500,000 from issuing 9,910 summonses to people who failed to move their vehicles when its alternate-side parking rules resumed on Monday, Feb. 7, 2011, following the deluge of snow and ice, the Times reported.

Spoiled motorists whined that their cars were still trapped by snow and ice, and therefore they could not move them to legal spots, giving new meaning to the ritual of entrapment.